m 


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ly  a  Transplanted  Easterner 


Arthur  E.Bostwic 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


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THE    DIFFERENT    WEST 


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THE  DIFFERENT  WEST 

As  Seen  by  a 
Transplanted  Easterner 

By  ARTHUR  E.  BOSTWICK 


'O,  East  is  East  and  West  is  West." 
— Kipling 


CHICAGO 

A.  C.  McCLURG  &  CO. 

1913 


Copyright 

A.  C.  McClurg  &  Co. 

1913 


Published  February,  1913 


W.  T.  HALL  PRINTING  COMPANY,  CHICAOO 


S7H 


PREFACE 

SOME  readers  will  find  fault  with  this  book 
because  it  neither  gives  statistics  nor  quotes 
authorities.  It  is  well  to  say,  therefore,  at  the 
outset,  that  it  is  written  for  those  who  dislike  both, 
and  who  like  to  read  straight  on  without  having 
their  attention  distracted  by  footnotes  or  figures. 
The  author  assumes  full  responsibility  for  what  he 
says,  and  if  he  has  inadvertently  missed  the  truth 
upon  occasion,  doubtless  it  matters  little. 

A.  E.  B. 


CONTENTS 


Chapter  I  page 


Some  Preliminaries 


I 


Scope  of  the  work  —  Advantages  of  first  im- 
pressions —  Difference  between  local  and 
general  peculiarities  —  What  is  "  The  West "? 

Chapter  II 
Flying  Impressions lo 

Topography  —  Vegetation  —  Climate  —  Cities 
and  towns  —  Transportation. 

Chapter  HI 
The  East's   Misunderstanding  of  the 
West 23 

"  The  Temper  of  the  West " —  A  new  racial 
character  —  "New"  countries  —  Social  cor- 
respondences—  Colonizers  and  colonized^ 
"  Hysteresis." 

Chapter  IV 
[The  West's  Misunderstanding  of  the 
East 37 

The  East's  "  stiffness  " — Mistaken  social  as- 
sumptions—  Is  the  East  incompetent?  —  The 
East  at  its  own  valuation. 


Contents 


Chapter  V  page 

The  West's  Political  Unrest    ....      47 

The  first  Western  "insurgents" — Eastern 
and  western  ill-feeling  —  Western  restless- 
ness—  Movements  from  below  upward  — 
Democracy  in  the  West  —  Bryan  and  Roose- 
velt—  Socialism  —  The  heritage  of  border 
lawlessness. 

Chapter  VI 
The  West's  Economic  Unrest    ....      66 

Speculation  —  Hatred  of  "Wall  Street"— 
The  experimental  temper  —  The  western 
judiciary  —  The  transportation  problem. 

Chapter  VII 
Education  in  the  West 80 

Public  education  —  Public  recreation  —  State 
universities  —  Lack  of  traditions  —  Co-edu- 
cation —  Faculty  and  student  —  Some  com- 
parisons —  Women's  clubs  and  public  libraries. 

Chapter  VIII 
Literature  in  the  West 95 

Boston's  former  primacy  —  Its  passage  to 
New  York  —  Western  writers  in  New  York 
—  Growth  of  local  feeling  —  The  business  of 
publishing  —  Western  journalism  — "Boom  " 
literature  —  Local  character  of  the  press. 


Contents 

Chapter  IX  page 

Science  in  the  West io8 

Its  practicality  —  Lack  of  popular  apprecia- 
tion—  Some  western  applications  of  science 

—  Water  purification  —  River    transportation 

—  Water  power  —  Scientific  agriculture  — 
Irrigation  —  The  smoke  nuisance  —  Railways. 

Chapter  X 
Art  in  the  West 123 

Antiquities  —  Domestic  art  —  Architecture  — 
Galleries  and  exhibitions  —  Art  production  in 
the  West  —  Public  appreciation  —  Music  and 
musicians  —  The  theatre  —  Art  instruction. 

Chapter  XI 
Society  in  the  West 138 

Social  status  a  neglected  subject  —  A  sug- 
gested scale  —  Influence  of  occupation  —  of 
religious  connection  —  Lack  of  a  leisure  class 

—  Hospitality  and  neighborly  feeling  —  Clubs 

—  Local  pride. 

Chapter  XII 
Sources  of  the  West's  Population    .     .     154 

Relationships  with  the  rest  of  the  country  — 
North  and  South  —  Foreign  races  —  Jews  — 
The  French  —  Germans  —  Scandinavians  — 
The  Indian  —  The  Negro  —  Lack  of  homo- 
geneity. 


Contents 

Chapter  XIII  page 

The  Speech  and  Manners  of  the  West     i66 

Variants  in  American  local  speech  —  Eastern 
and  western  "tricks  of  speech" — Written 
and  spoken  language  —  School  and  family 
influence  —  The  "  American  voice  " —  West- 
ern freedom  of  manner  —  Chaperonage  — 
Working   hours  —  Recreations  —  Conclusion. 


THE   DIFFERENT  WEST 


THE  DIFFERENT  WEST 

CHAPTER  I 

SOME  PRELIMINARIES 

MUCH  ridicule  has  been  heaped  on  the  heads 
of  travelers  who,  after  a  very  brief  sojourn 
in  a  strange  place,  essay  to  describe  what  they  have 
seen  and  to  comment  on  it.  Obviously,  knowledge 
gained  In  a  few  days  cannot  be  thorough,  but  first 
impressions  are  of  value, -and  they  quickly  die  away; 
so  that  it  is  possible  that  the  visitor  of  a  day  may 
have  something  to  tell  us  that  might  quite  escape 
the  resident  of  ten  years.  It  is  not  the  rapid  glance 
that  constitutes  superficiality;  it  Is  the  mistaken  idea 
that  this  glance  may  be  made  the  basis  of  a  thorough 
discussion.  A  lightning  flash  may  reveal  details  of 
a  landscape  that  are  unnotlceable  in  a  careful  scru- 
tiny by  noonday  light;  but  one  does  not  go  to  the 
view  by  lightning  for  topographical  or  geological 
data. 

This  book  assumes  to  give  scarcely  more  than 
first  Impressions,  except  in  the  discussion  of  matters 
that  are  as  patent  in  the  East  as  in  the  West. 

And  it  is  obvious  that  if  we  are  to  catalogue  and 

1 


The  Different  West 


discuss  the  particulars  in  which  the  West  differs 
from  the  East,  our  observer  must  be  one  who  is 
familiar  with  the  East.  The  foreigner,  if  he  is  an 
Englishman,  notes  first  the  aspects  in  which  America, 
as  a  whole,  differs  from  England;  all  states  look 
alike  to  him.  The  typical  American  of  the  British 
novel,  as  has  been  amusingly  noted  in  a  recent  maga- 
zine article,*  combines  the  dialects  and  the  manner- 
isms of  Maine  and  Texas,  of  North  Carolina  and 
Arizona.  If  the  foreign  observer  is  a  German,  he 
is  struck  by  any  Anglo-Saxon  peculiarity,  including 
those  that  we  share  with  our  transatlantic  cousins. 
To  these  a  Frenchman  or  Italian  is  apt  to  add 
various  Teutonic  or  non-Latin  items.  All  of  which 
is  simply  the  elementary  arithmetical  truth  that  if 
you  desire  to  find  the  difference  between  two  quan- 
tities you  must  subtract  one  from  the  other;  taking 
both  from  a  third  will  be  of  no  avail.  And  when 
one  is  a  variable  that  rapidly  approaches  the  other, 
as  time  passes,  then  the  sooner  the  subtracting  is 
done,  the  more  nearly  will  the  difference  appear  in 
its  original  amount.  When  the  two  objects  to  be  com- 
pared—  in  this  case  the  easterner  and  the  westerner 
—  are  very  nearly  equal  to  start  with,  the  approach 
due  to  contact  is  very  swift.  Differences  that  appall, 
amuse,  or  vex  at  the  outset,  are  overlooked  in  a  few 

♦The  Yankee  in  British  Fiction,  by  Frank  M.  Bicknell.    The 
Outlook,  Nov.  ig,  1910. 


Some  Preliminaries 


months,  and  one  soon  forgets  that  they  ever  existed. 
The  newcomer  in  Illinois  or  Missouri  soon  finds 
himself  almost  remembering  that  persimmons  grew 
on  the  New  Hampshire  farm,  and  forgets  that  chest- 
nuts ever  existed  outside  of  literature. 

A  Russian  experimental  psychologist,  in  a  recent 
interesting  series  of  investigations  concerning  the 
apprehension  of  numerical  relations  by  animals, 
seems  to  have  proved  conclusively  that  dogs  can 
count  up  to  four.  At  least  this  is  true  if  by  "  count- 
ing" we  mean  distinguishing  that  number  of  objects 
or  events  from  other  smaller  numbers.  The  experi- 
menter, Zeliony  by  name,  says  that  the  impression 
made  on  the  mind  by  any  one  of  a  series  of  events 
is  colored  by  all  those  that  have  gone  before:  hence 
we  are  able  to  distinguish  the  fourth  of  a  series,  for 
instance,  which  has  three  predecessors,  from  the 
third,  which  has  only  two. 

In  like  manner,  the  impressions  of  a  newcomer 
vary  slightly  with  every  day  of  his  stay,  even  if  they 
are  the  same  objectively.  The  effect  produced  by 
looking  down  the  same  street  is  different  on  the 
second  day  from  the  first,  and  still  more  different 
on  the  third.  This  difference  is  not  wholly  due  to 
addition  of  impressions;  if  it  were  so,  the  effect 
should  grow  stronger  with  time,  whereas  the  reverse 
is  generally  true;  perception  becomes  dulled  with 
habit,  details  once  noticed  are  blurred  or  smoothed 


The  Different  West 


over,  and  familiarity  relegates  the  whole  impression 
more  or  less  to  the  subconsciousness.  Recognition 
of  detail  thus  grows  up  to  a  certain  point  and  then 
fades.  This  point  of  maximum  recognition  is  the 
one  at  which  one  should  sit  down  to  record  his 
impressions. 

The  case  is  different  with  the  recognition  of  rela- 
tionships, which  requires  thought.  This  usually  im- 
proves with  time.  One's  impressions  of  life  in  a 
foreign  city  might  be  more  vivid  and  interesting  in 
the  first  few  weeks  than  at  a  later  period;  one's 
understanding  of  what  it  all  meant  might  not  be 
good  within  the  year,  and  might  constantly  improve 
thereafter. 

The  accounts  written  by  foreign  travelers  of  their 
first  glimpse  of  New  York  from  the  bay,  of  the 
docks,  of  the  drive  through  the  streets  to  the  hotel, 
of  the  reporter's  first  visit,  and  so  on,  are  not  only 
interesting,  but  extremely  valuable;  but  when  these 
visitors  begin  to  generalize  on  short  acquaintance,  as 
they  so  often  regrettably  do,  what  they  have  to  say 
is  not  so  well  worth  while. 

When  the  writer  of  this  volume  has  included  in 
it  more  than  first  impressions  he  has  tried  not  to  go 
beyond  the  kind  of  generalizations  that  are  made 
earliest  and  that  are  not  far  removed  from  the 
impressions  themselves. 

The  recorder  of  somewhat  superficial  impressions 


Superficial  Impressions 


runs  the  risk,  of  course,  of  mistaking  a  local  pecul- 
iarity for  one  that  is  common  to  a  wider  region; 
this  he  can  avoid  only  by  observing  and  comparing 
peculiarities  in  divers  points  of  that  region. 

I  once  knew  a  good  lady  from  South  Carolina 
who  occasionally  visited  relatives  in  Waltham,  Mass. 
She  was  a  keen  observer  and  discoursed  freely  on 
what  she  regarded  as  New  England  peculiarities. 
Some  were  such  in  truth,  but  most  would  have  puz- 
zled the  majority  of  New  Englanders  to  recognize, 
being  customs  or  idioms  peculiar  to  Massachusetts, 
or  to  Waltham,  or  even,  perhaps,  to  the  family  in 
which  she  visited.  So  our  British  cousin  who  has 
spent  some  time  in  New  York  returns  to  report  the 
customs  and  peculiarities  of  that  city  as  those  of  the 
United  States  in  general. 

In  order  to  avoid  such  a  mistake,  or  at  least  to 
render  its  commission  unlikely,  it  is  not  necessary 
that  the  traveler  should  visit  every  town,  hamlet,  and 
farm  in  the  region  of  which  he  is  to  write.  A 
somewhat  wide  sampling  is  all  that  is  necessary.  If 
we  open  a  dozen  cans,  chosen  at  random  from  a  pile 
of  several  thousand,  and  find  tomatoes  in  all,  we  are 
justified  in  concluding  —  not  perhaps  that  there  are 
absolutely  no  peaches  or  pears  in  the  lot,  but  at  any 
rate  that  the  tomato  is  abundant  in  the  pile.  So  if 
one  finds  here  and  there  throughout  a  region  the 
same  custom,  the  same  trick  of  speech,  he  con- 


The  Different  West 


eludes  that  it  is  characteristic  of  the  region.  Our 
friend  from  Waltham,  Mass.,  would  not  have  con- 
fused the  peculiarities  of  that  town  with  those  of 
New  England  had  she  made  observations  also  in 
Burlington,  Vt,  Concord,  N.  H.,  and  Waterbury, 
Conn. 

The  time  has  now  come  for  us  to  ask  "  What  is 
the  West?  Where,  precisely,  are  its  boundaries?" 
A  Chicago  paper  recently  printed  a  clever  cartoon 
giving  a  bird's-eye  view  of  the  United  States,  and 
showing  a  strip  on  the  Atlantic  coast  surrounded 
by  a  high  wall  and  labeled  "The  East,"  while  the 
rest  of  the  country  bore  the  legend  "  Only  the 
West."  As  a  graphic  delineation  of  eastern  opin- 
ion this  is  hardly  an  exaggeration,  and  the  reason  is 
not  far  to  seek.  Our  country  began  with  a  strip 
along  the  Atlantic,  and  the  western  edge  of  this 
strip  was  of  course  "The  West."  Central  New 
York  and  Pennsylvania,  and  western  Virginia,  were 
all  once  on  this  western  edge.  The  strip  has  wid- 
ened until  it  reaches  from  ocean  to  ocean,  and  it  has 
necessarily  done  so  entirely  by  westward  extension 
of  this  edge,  the  eastern  being  fixed  at  the  Atlantic 
coast.  Hence  every  part  of  the  country  west  of 
the  original  boundary  has  been  successively  "The 
West,"  and  this  shifting  has  been  so  rapid  that  a 
new  strip  has  acquired  the  name  before  the  older 
ones  have  had  time  to  lose  it.    Hence  it  happens  that 


Where  Is  the  West? 


a  New  Englander  still  occasionally  talks  of  "  going 
west"  to  Buffalo,  N.  Y.,  and  a  Jerseyite  will  talk 
of  his  "western  relatives"  in  Wilkesbarre,  Pa. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten,  however,  that  the 
expanding  strip  of  American  dominion  did  not  pass 
over  absolute  wilderness.  It  overflowed  and  sub- 
merged, more  or  less  completely,  the  French  settle- 
ments in  the  Mississippi  Valley,  and  the  Spanish 
colonies  in  Texas  and  California.  All  these  had 
already  their  own  customs  and  their  own  points  of 
view.  _To  the  St.  Louisan,  the  Mississippi  has 
always  divided  the  East  from  the  West,  while  to 
the  San  Franciscan  the  East  has  been  as  all- 
Inclusive  as  the  West  has  been  to  the  Atlantic  Coast 
dweller  —  hence  the  story  of  the  two  girls,  one  of 
whom  had  been  East,  to  Denver,  while  the  other 
had  gone  West,  to  Pittsburg. 

In  selecting  any  one  region  of  the  country  to 
describe  by  the  name  of  "The  West,"  one  is  thus 
confronted  by  an  embarrassment  of  riches.  The 
most  reasonable  criterion  would  appear  to  consist 
in  asking  the  question  "  What  region  most  fre- 
quently accepts  the  name  as  applied  to  itself?" 
Now  we  find  that  no  matter  how  central  New  York 
and  Pennsylvania  are  regarded  by  Atlantic  dwellers, 
they  never  themselves  acknowledge  that  they  are 
"  western,"  looking  upon  the  term,  indeed,  as 
involving  a  certain  degree  of  opprobrium.     Simi- 


8  The  Different  West 

larly,  a  Californian  or  an  Oregonian  seldom  admits 
that  he  lives  "  in  the  West."  His  abode  is  in  "  the 
Pacific  States,"  or  "on  the  Coast" — a  superb 
phrase  whose  magnificent  disrespect  to  the  Atlantic 
can  not  be  too  much  admired. 

So  far  as  I  can  find  out,  the  only  westerner  self- 
confessed  and  unashamed,  is  he  who  dwells  in  what 
easterners  call  the  "  Middle  West" — the  great  belt 
of  states  fringing  the  Mississippi  on  either  side, 
especially  about  the  country's  middle  latitudes. 
Here  the  denizens  ask  naturally,  "  How  do  you  like 
it  here  in  the  West?"  and  speak  of  "us  west- 
erners." They  talk,  to  be  sure,  of  "going  west" 
when  they  entrain  for  Denver  or  Pueblo,  but  this 
is  purely  in  a  kinematic  sense,  and  means  merely  that 
the  train  is  to  move  toward  the  setting  sun.  Few 
would  refer  to  Colorado,  in  a  static  sense,  as  "  The 
West." 

Some  dwellers  in  this  region,  it  is  true,  object  to 
the  words  "west"  and  "western,"  as  applied  to 
them  and  their  states.  I  was  taken  to  task  not 
long  ago  by  a  Chicagoan  of  eastern  origin  for  so 
using  them.  "The  Central  States,"  he  maintained, 
should  be  the  true  term.  Now  this  phrase,  aside 
from  the  fact  that  nobody  uses  it,  is  not  even 
descriptive.  The  "  Central  States"  are  those  in  the 
neighborhood  of  Colorado;  certainly  Indiana  and 
Iowa  do  not  belong  to  them. 


The  Middle  West 


Then  an  inevitable  confusion  with  the  so-called 
"  Middle  States "  would  result.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  names  of  this  sort  are  traditional  and  habitual, 
and  rarely  descriptive ;  but  the  exchange  of  a  famil- 
iar name  that  was  once  descriptive  and  has  become 
non-descriptive  only  through  changed  conditions,  for 
an  unfamiliar  one  that  never  was  and  never  will 
be  descriptive,  does  not  commend  itself. 

The  "Middle  West,"  then,  is  the  "West"  of 
this  modest  treatise  —  the  West,  whither  its  writer 
has  been  transplanted  and  to  which,  in  common  with 
its  older  inhabitants,  he  "  points  with  pride."  It  is 
a  land  of  whose  differences  there  is  something  to 
say;  were  it  not  so,  these  pages  would  have  no 
reason  for  being.  But  those  differences,  as  they 
really  are,  are  not  as  the  eye  of  the  westerner  sees 
them,  nor  yet  as  that  of  the  easterner  beholds  them. 
Perhaps  the  eye  of  the  present  writer  has  not  dis- 
criminated them  aright;  it  may  take  nothing  less 
than  the  fabled  Eye  of  Faith  to  view  them  as  they 
are.  At  any  rate,  they  are  here  set  down  as  they 
obtrude  themselves  upon  one  person's  consciousness. 
Like  Luther,  here  he  stands  —  on  the  banks  of  the 
Mississippi — he  "can  not  do  otherwise." 


CHAPTER  II 

FLYING  IMPRESSIONS 

WHEN  Sylvia  Pankhurst,  the  English  suffra- 
gette, was  in  St.  Louis,  she  addressed  the 
members  of  the  City  Club,  just  after  luncheon.  As 
she  entered  the  crowded  dining  room  of  the  club, 
accompanied  by  two  other  ladies,  those  present 
naturally  rose  to  their  feet  and  so  remained  until 
the  women  were  seated.  What  kind  of  treatment 
Miss  Pankhurst  had  expected,  I  do  not  know,  but 
she  is  said  to  have  been  deeply  affected  by  this 
courteous  reception  —  something,  she  said,  that  she 
had  never  experienced  at  home.  It  is  to  be  hoped 
that  she  did  not  wrongly  interpret  it  as  a  universal 
expression  of  sympathy  with  her  ideas. 

In  the  course  of  her  speech,  when  she  was  telling 
how  the  London  bobbies  had  driven  her  suffra- 
gette sisters  from  their  posts,  she  remarked,  "but 
they  came  back."  This  bit  of  appropriate  but  quite 
unintentional  slang  was  met  with  an  instant  roar  of 
laughter  and  applause.  The  expression  on  the 
speaker's  face  was  worth  going  miles  to  see.  She 
saw  she  had  made  some  kind  of  a  hit,  but  she  did 
not  see  why  or  how;  and  she  was  half  inclined  to 

10 


Bluffs  and  Prairies  il 

suspect  that  the  demonstration  was  intended  to  be 
unfriendly.  Whether  her  American  friends  enlight- 
ened her  or  whether  she  is  still  wondering  what  it 
was  all  about,  I  do  not  know. 

These  trivial  incidents  illustrate  very  well  what 
the  newcomer,  especially  the  foreign  newcomer,  has 
to  meet  in  the  West  —  little  differences  from  the 
treatment  to  which  he  is  accustomed  or  from  the 
environment  with  which  he  is  familiar — differences 
so  small  that  he  is  doubtful  whether  they  exist  or 
not,  or  is  even  unaware  of  their  existence  until  the 
involuntary  smiles  of  those  about  him  lead  him  to 
investigate. 

The  first  differences  noticed  by  a  newcomer  to  a 
given  region  are  those  apparent  to  the  senses,  espe- 
cially to  the  sight;  those  of  topography,  vegetation, 
and  climate.  In  the  vast  region  that  we  have  chosen 
to  denominate  "the  West,"  there  are  no  mountains 
and  very  few  hills;  whole  states  are  nearly  level 
except  for  the  cuttings  made  by  the  rivers.  Where 
these  rivers  are  of  any  size  the  flat  country  is 
divided  into  two  levels:  "bottom  lands,"  the  broad 
alluvial  plains  constituting  the  river's  flood-area, 
over  which  it  meanders  almost  at  will,  and  the 
prairies  at  the  level  of  the  top  of  the  bluffs.  The 
transition  from  one  level  to  the  other,  especially 
where  the  bluffs  are  soft  and  earthy  and  easily  fur- 
rowed into  ravines,  is  often  beautiful  and  gives  the 


12  The  Different  West 

impression  of  a  hilly  region.  This  may  be  near 
the  river  itself  or  it  may  be  fifteen  miles  distant. 

The  easterner's  idea  of  the  Middle  West  as  a  flat 
country  is  apt  to  receive  a  jolt  when  he  visits,  for 
instance,  Alton,  111.,  a  Mississippi  River  town  that 
is  as  precipitous  as  Providence,  R.  I.  The  relation 
of  river-bluffs  to  both  prairie  and  bottom  lands  is 
often  misapprehended,  even  by  those  who  frequently 
pass  over  all  three  in  railway  journeys. 

Another  misapprehension  is  that  prairies  are 
always  flat.  Bottom  lands  are  necessarily  so;  the 
plains  west  of  the  Missouri  are  apparently  so, 
although  really  they  rise  steadily  in  level  to  the  foot 
of  the  Rockies  where  they  are  "mile-high."  But 
prairies  may  be,  and  often  are,  lovely  rolling  coun- 
try, intersected  by  beautiful  ravines.  What  makes 
them  striking  to  an  easterner's  eye  is  the  absence 
of  rock.  Such  rolling  country,  brilliant  green  with 
young  wheat,  as  far  as  the  eye  can  reach,  reminds 
one  of  a  lawn,  especially  at  a  little  distance,  and  an 
easterner  can  scarcely  help  having  the  impression 
that  it  has  been  cleared  of  stones  and  graded,  at 
huge  expense,  whereas  the  configuration  is  perfectly 
natural. 

But  even  a  flat  region  is  far  from  uninteresting. 
It  gives  one  the  impression  of  largeness  and  airi- 
ness that  seems  inseparable  from  the  West.  "You 
ought  to  see  the  country  where  we  live,"  said  a  west- 


Bottom  Lands  13 


em  farmer's  daughter,  "Why,  it's  perfectly  beau- 
tiful; it's  just  as  flat  as  the  top  of  a  table."  This 
girl  would  probably  always  regard  hilly  country  as 
alien;  interesting,  perhaps,  but  not  homelike.  To 
thousands  of  our  fellow  citizens  the  rocky  hills  of 
New  England  are  simply  an  infertile  wilderness  — 
difficult,  monotonous,  and  disagreeable. 

A  man  loves  the  kind  of  country  where  he  was 
born  and  bred:  that  is  right;  only  he  must  not 
assume  that  those  born  and  bred  elsewhere  should 
and  do  love  his  kind  of  country  instead  of  their  own. 
Both  have  their  beauties,  as  even  the  discriminating 
stranger  must  acknowledge.  The  "American  bot- 
toms"—  the  flood  plain  of  the  Mississippi  on  the 
Illinois  side  in  the  neighborhood  of  St.  Louis,  form 
an  absolutely  flat  region  of  hundreds  of  square 
miles.  There  are  few  more  impressive  sights  than 
this  great  plain,  as  viewed  from  the  giant  Indian 
mound  near  the  banks  of  the  Cahokia  Creek,  green 
with  the  new  wheat,  and  dotted  here  and  there  with 
the  smaller,  but  still  great,  tumuli  of  a  vanished 
race.  The  indifference  of  the  residents  of  the  neigh- 
borhood to  this  region  of  wonders  is  astonishing. 
Fortunately  it  is  as  hard  to  destroy  a  tumulus  as 
it  is  to  erect  one,  and  the  material  —  the  common 
soft  earth  of  the  region  —  excites  no  one's  cupidity; 
otherwise  the  mounds  would  have  been  leveled  to 
the  ground  long  ago. 


14  The  Different  West 

This  softness  of  the  earth,  and  its  lack  of  stones, 
is  also  responsible  for  another  feature  that  is  noted 
at  once  by  the  eastern  eye  —  the  muddiness  of  the 
rivers.  Clear  water  flows  over  rock  from  which 
all  soil  has  long  since  been  washed  away;  water 
running  through  an  alluvial  plain,  shifting  its  course 
and  washing  away  its  soft,  earthy  banks,  must  needs 
be  muddy.  "What's  that?"  said  a  slum  child  on 
her  first  view  of  the  Mississippi's  brown,  rolling 
flood,  during  a  charitable  "  fresh-airing."  "  What 
do  you  think  it  is?"  was  the  answering  query 
from  one  of  the  fair  patronesses.  "I  don't  know 
for  sure,"  rejoined  the  child,  hesitatingly;  "but  it 
looks  like  coffee."  It  surely  does;  but  it  has  beauty 
of  its  own  for  the  eyes  that  are  not  disappointed 
because  it  is  not  something  else. 

Some  people  ought  to  find  fault  with  the  sky  be- 
cause it  is  not  green  like  the  trees.  I  have  heard  of 
a  California  woman  who  said  she  would  object 
to  the  pearly  gates  of  heaven  if  they  were  not  made 
of  the  abalone  shell  of  her  native  Pacific.  And  I 
have  listened  to  loud  complaints  uttered  because 
the  Mississippi  a  thousand  miles  above  its  mouth 
is  not  as  wide  as  the  Hudson  at  New  York! 

The  great  eastern  rivers,  so  far  as  they  are  great, 
are  not  real  rivers  at  all,  but  drowned  valleys  —  estu- 
aries, arms  of  the  sea,  with  salt  or  brackish  water, 
slight  current  and  tidal  flow.     The  great  western 


Rivers  in  the  West  15 

rivers  are  as  far  from  the  ocean,  and  as  independent 
of  it,  as  the  brooks;  they  are  in  fact  huge  brooks 
and  resemble  in  no  respect  the  navigable  reaches 
of  the  Hudson,  the  Connecticut,  or  the  Delaware. 

These  differences  have  a  wide  influence  on  condi- 
tions of  life.  Those  relating  to  the  navigability  of 
the  rivers  will  be  touched  upon  elsewhere,  but  those 
that  affect  the  appearance  of  the  streams  as  they  flow 
past  cities  belong  here.  The  easterner  thinks  of  a 
navigable  river  as  fringed  with  wharves  as  it  passes 
a  city  —  projections  at  right-angles  to  its  banks. 
But  in  swift-flowing  streams  —  brooks  on  a  huge 
scale  —  varying  in  level  perhaps  forty  feet  from 
high  to  low  water,  such  wharves  are  impracticable. 
On  rivers  like  the  Mississippi  the  sloping  bank  is 
simply  paved  to  form  a  "levee"  and  the  water 
comes  up  as  far  as  it  will,  the  boats  with  it.  Steam- 
boats have  long  gangways  slung  from  their  bows, 
which  can  be  let  down  either  at  levees  or  on  any 
convenient  spot  along  the  banks  where  paved  spaces 
do  not  exist,  or  wharf-boats  are  moored  at  the 
edge  of  the  water  and  are  hauled  up  and  let  out 
as  it  advances  and  recedes. 

A  recent  novel  in  which  the  hero  starts  on  his 
career  from  St.  Louis  gives  a  stirring  picture  of 
the  water-front  there  as  the  eastern  author  imagined 
it;  the  long  wharves  and  the  great  steamers 
between  them,  hauling  out  into  the  stream  as  they 


1 6  The  D liferent  West 

start,  just  as  they  do  in  the  North  River  at  New 
York,  or  the  Delaware  at  Philadelphia.  If  the 
author  had  ever  seen  one  of  the  big  western  rivers, 
or  had  even  read  of  the  conditions  that  obtain  along 
their  banks,  he  would  not  have  penned  so  absurd 
a  passage. 

Next  to  topographical  features  the  easterner  is 
struck  by  differences  of  vegetation,  and  here  we 
must  exclude  those  due  purely  to  differences  of  lati- 
tude. The  dweller  in  the  Northwest  who  visits  the 
Southwest  is  struck,  of  course,  by  variations  due  to 
his  southward  travel  —  with  these  we  have  nothing 
to  do.  The  most  striking  differences  to  the  traveler 
along  one  parallel  of  latitude  are  probably  those  due 
to  changed  agricultural  conditions,  chiefly  the  huge 
size  of  the  fields  and  the  enormous  areas  devoted  to 
one  crop. 

In  Illinois  one  may  travel  for  hours  without  see- 
ing anything  but  corn  and  that  in  apparently  limit- 
less areas.  As  one  goes  farther  west,  the  wheat 
intrudes,  takes  the  middle  of  the  stage  and  then 
yields  partly  to  alfalfa  or  other  crops,  but  there 
is  the  same  extent,  the  same  impressive  monotony, 
all  of  which  is  foreign  to  the  East.  In  the  case  of 
natural  vegetation  there  is  hardly  the  same  degree 
of  noticeable  difference,  except  to  the  botanist. 
Trees  of  the  poplar  family,  such  as  the  sycamore  and 
Cottonwood,  are  more  numerous ;  others,  the  maple 


Western  Weather  17 

and  the  elm  for  instance,  grow  fewer.  Strange  wild 
fruits  such  as  the  persimmon  are  abundant;  spring- 
flowering  shrubs  such  as  the  red-bud  give  an  unfa- 
miliar look  to  the  woods  in  that  season,  yet  taken 
by  and  large,  vegetative  nature  does  not  obtrude 
her  differences  on  the  easterner,  except  perhaps  in 
the  parts  of  the  bottom-lands  given  over  to  floods 
and  abandoned  for  cultivation.  Here  there  is  a 
jungle  of  willows,  wild  vines,  and  the  like,  that  gives 
a  peculiarly  savage  and  unfamiliar  look. 

Variation  of  climate,  like  that  of  vegetation, 
which  depends  on  it  sio  closely,  is  of  course  less 
noticed  when  traveling  east  and  west  than  from 
north  to  south  or  the  reverse.  The  chief  things 
that  make  that  of  the  Middle  West  different  from 
that  of  the  East  are  the  absence  of  mountains,  the 
inland  situation,  and  the  fact  that,  as  our  weather 
moves  from  west  to  east,  the  West  gets  its  storms 
and  its  hot  and  cold  waves  earlier. 

Absence  of  a  great  body  of  water  near  by,  with 
its  capacity  for  absorbing  and  storing  heat,  makes 
the  climate  on  the  same  parallel  colder  in  winter  and 
hotter  in  summer.  On  a  hot  August  day  there  is  no 
chance  that  the  wind  by  switching  to  the  east  will 
bring  the  cool  sea  air  over  the  parched  country;  the 
familiar  newspaper  headline,  "  No  Relief  in  Sight," 
has  a  more  sinister  meaning.  At  the  same  time  the 
remoteness  of  great  bodies  of  water  lessens  the 


1 8  The  Different  West 

humidity — that  great  terror  of  the  eastern  sum- 
mer and  winter  weather  ahke.  Fifty  below  zero  in 
Minnesota  may  be  merely  stimulating,  where  twenty 
above  in  New  York  may  seem  unbearably  cold.  So 
also  in  the  latter  city  the  "scare"  headlines  in  the 
papers  begin  to  bloom  at  eighty-five  degrees,  where 
ninety-five  degrees  in  dryer  St.  Louis  scarcely  brings 
them  out. 

The  absence  of  mountains  means  greater  regu- 
larity in  atmospheric  disturbances  —  a  tendency  to 
'follow  the  laws  of  meteorology  without  interruption. 
Here  we  may  have  a  great  cyclonic  movement, 
around  a  center  of  low-pressure,  a  thousand  miles 
in  diameter,  entirely  over  flat  country.  One  of  the 
things  that  happens  according  to  regulation  in  such 
a  vast  cyclonic  disturbance  is  the  development  of 
thunderstorms,  tempests,  and  whirlwinds,  in  its 
southeast  quadrant;  and  all  these  are  more  frequent 
in  the  West  than  in  more  broken  country.  Tor- 
nadoes do  occur  in  New  England  and  the  Middle 
States,  but  no  one  thinks  of  taking  out  tornado 
insurance  there,  or  of  building  "  cyclone-cellars  "  for 
refuge,  as  is  done  regularly  in  many  parts  of  the 
West.  The  sign  "Tornado  Insurance"  on  a  busi- 
ness building  is  one  of  the  things  that  gives  the 
eastern  visitor  a  mental  jolt  and  reminds  him  that 
he  has  entered  a  region  that  is  different  meteoro- 
logically as  well  as  topographically.    What  has  been 


7 

The  West  the  Weather's  Source  19 

said  of  the  absence  of  bodies  of  water  does  not 
apply  of  course  to  the  Great  Lake  region,  where 
the  effect  of  the  lakes  on  the  climate  is  similar,  on 
a  smaller  scale,  to  that  of  the  ocean;  but  this  effect 
is  purely  local. 

The  nearness  of  the  West  to  the  source  of  the 
weather  is  an  influence  that  acts  in  the  same  direc- 
tion as  its  uniformity  of  surface.  We  do  not  know 
exactly  how  or  why  the  great  atmospheric  whirls 
that  we  call  cyclones  and  anti-cyclones  begin,  but  we 
know  that  they  start  in  the  Far  West  and  travel 
thence  eastward  across  the  continent.  Our  weather 
prediction  is  largely  the  art  of  watching  them,  track- 
ing them,  and  estimating  when  they  will  reach  a 
given  spot.  When  the  disgusted  citizen  swears  at 
the  weather  bureau  it  is  apt  to  be  because  the  erratic 
whirl  with  its  attendant  "weather"  fooled  the  fore- 
caster by  slowing  up,  or  turning  aside,  or  perhaps 
by  melting  away  altogether.  The  nearer  one  is  to 
the  starting  point  the  less  chance  all  these  accidents 
have  to  happen;  hence  the  weather  is  somewhat 
more  uniform  in  the  West  than  in  the  East.  Also 
the  storms  are  more  severe;  the  hot  and  cold  waves 
are  felt  in  their  full  force. 

Most  of  the  differences  mentioned  in  what  pre- 
cedes do  not  depend  on  the  hand  of  man;  what  is 
said  of  the  crops  constitutes  the  only  exception. 
There  are  other  differences,  however,  noticeable  to 


20  The  Different  West 

the  casual  traveler  as  he  glances  from  the  car  win- 
dow, that  are  artificial  rather  than  natural.  Farm- 
houses seem  smaller  and  more  infrequent.  This  is 
partly  due  to  the  vastness  of  the  setting,  which 
makes  a  normal  house  with  its  usual  outbuildings 
seem  insignificant;  partly  to  the  fact  that  the  use 
of  machinery  in  farm-operation  has  rendered  a  large 
resident  staff  unnecessary.  It  is  only  at  harvest  that 
an  army  of  men  must  be  employed,  and  these  are 
hired  temporarily,  often  from  outside  the  boun- 
daries of  the  state.  The  country  is  familiar  with 
the  annual  newspaper  item  to  the  effect  that  so- 
many  thousand  men  will  be  required  to  harvest  the 
wheat  or  corn  crops  in  Kansas  or  Nebraska.  These 
are  all  "  emergency  help." 

As  the  train  passes  through  cities  and  towns  the 
traveler  notices  that  their  immediate  environs  are 
not  so  well  kept  as  in  eastern  cities.  The  outskirts 
of  most  American  cities  are  discreditable:  Boston 
is  a  shining  exception.  Possibly  this  condition  is 
inseparable  from  continuous  and  rapid  growth;  and 
as  this  is  taking  place  more  rapidly  in  the  West 
than  in  the  East,  it  might  be  expected  that  condi- 
tions there  would  be  even  more  unsatisfactory. 
Even  the  more  remote  suburbs,  accessible  by  rail  or 
long-distance  trolley  beyond  the  rim  of  immediate 
outskirts,  are  not  in  general  so  noteworthy  as  in 
the  East.    Chicago  has  some  of  great  beauty  on  the 


Railway  Peculiarities  21 

lake  shore,  but  in  general  such  suburban  towns  as 
those  about  Philadelphia  or  in  the  New  Jersey  and 
"Sound"  environs  of  New  York,  are  lacking.  The 
suburb  habit  is  not  so  fully  developed.  San  Fran- 
cisco is  much  more  like  New  York  in  this  respect 
than  any  town  in  the  West  as  we  are  using  the 
term.  In  general  the  type  of  residence  district  that 
the  easterner  associates  with  a  more  or  less  distant 
suburb  is  to  be  found  within  the  city  limits  in  west- 
ern cities.  In  many  of  them,  too,  the  private 
"  Place,"  a  short-parked  street  constituting  a  rus  in 
urbe,  is  much  in  vogue  and  highly  developed. 

Some  of  the  most  striking  differences  apparent  to 
the  traveler  he  will  notice  best  from  the  rear  obser- 
vation platform  of  his  train.  In  the  first  place  he 
will  find  that  he  is  running  on  a  single  track, 
although  he  may  be  on  one  of  the  fast  *'  flyers  "  with 
de  luxe  equipment.  But  the  place  of  the  second 
track  will  often  be  taken  by  a  single-track  inter- 
urban  trolley  road,  whose  rails  parallel  for  miles 
those  on  which  he  is  running.  The  roadbed  is  as 
good  as  that  of  the  steam  road  on  which  he  travels, 
sometimes  even  better.  The  cars  are  large  and  fine, 
and  race  successfully  with  the  flyer,  sometimes  get- 
ting ahead  of  it. 

The  development  of  these  interurban  electric 
roads  has  no  parallel  in  the  East.  Their  patrons 
use  them  for  comparatively  long  trips  and  they  even 


22  The  Different  West 

run  sleepers  whose  conveniences  are  in  some  respects 
greater  than  those  of  the  standard  Pullmans.  The 
interurban  electric  terminal  in  Indianapolis  is  a  note- 
worthy building  and  one  even  more  striking  is  to  be 
erected  in  St.  Louis,  where  the  Illinois  Traction  Co., 
one  of  the  largest  of  the  interurban  electric  roads, 
has  built  an  expensive  bridge  over  the  Mississippi 
for  its  exclusive  use. 

Some  of  these  items,  briefly  mentioned  here,  will 
be  dwelt  upon  more  at  length  in  subsequent  chapters. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  east's  misunderstanding  OF  THE  WEST 

ONE  of  the  most  interesting  of  Mr.  Bryce's 
chapters  is  that  on  "The  Temper  of  the 
West."  In  it,  however,  he  commits  the  capital  error 
of  making  his  West  too  inclusive,  his  dividing  line 
between  it  and  the  East  being  apparently  the  Alle- 
ghany Mountains.  What  he  has  to  say  of  the  West 
relates  therefore  sometimes  to  the  Mississippi  Val- 
ley, sometimes  to  the  Rocky  Mountain  region,-some:^ 
times  to  the  Pacific  Coast.  At  the  present  day, 
generalization  that  will  apply  to  all  three  is  espe- 
cially difficult.  The  "temper"  ofjjie^ Pacific  slope 
is  not  at  all  that  ojjhe  JUinois  and  Indiana  prairies. 
The  underlying  note  of  the  chapter  is  the  effect  on 
the  westerner  of  his  recent  entrance  into  a  vast  pro- 
ductive, but  undeveloped  region.  This  has  doubt- 
less had  its  effect  on  the  pioneer  wave  whose  prog- 
ress westward  from  the  Atlantic  we  have  already 
noted.  But  that  wave  has  long  passed  over  the 
part  of  the  country  to  which  we  have  given  the 
name  of  "West"  in  these  pages.  The  temper  of 
our  "West"  may  be  influenced  by  pioneer  condi- 
tions, but  hardly  by  such  conditions  in  the  present. 

23 


24  The  Different  West 

I  should  say  that  the  "temper  of  the  West"  is 
preeminently  one  of  restlessness  under  restraint  — 
of  efforts  at  independence  in  politics,  of  disregard 
of  social  and  traditional  curbs,  of  dislike  of  any- 
body or  anything  that  tries  to  lead  from  outside  or 
to  impose  restrictions  of  any  kind. 

According  to  some  writers  we  are  developing  in 
the  United  States  a  new  national  and  racial  charac- 
ter. This  is  a  favorite  subject  with  foreign 
observers.  They  pick  out  whatever  they  can  find 
that  is  weird  or  bizarre  in  our  literature,  our  man- 
ners or  our  methods,  and  wonder  whether  it  is  not 
an  indication  that  we  are  just  about  to  turn  out  a 
new  racial  product.  It  used  to  be  gravely  asserted 
that  if  we  were  let  alone  we  would  be  so  affected 
by  environment  that  we  should  gradually  but  per- 
manently take  on  the  racial  characteristics  of  the 
Indian.  The  American  himself  bothers  little  about 
his  own  peculiarities,  least  of  all  to  inquire  whether 
they  are  racial  or  accidental,  but  if  a  new  product 
is  really  turned  out  by  what  Zangwill  aptly  calls  the 
Melting  Pot,  we  might  expect  it  to  appear  first  in 
the  West  and  to  look  forward  to  the  "temper"  of 
that  region  as  the  transformed  temper  of  the  whole 
American  people. 

This  new  national  and  racial  character,  according 
to  G.  W.  Steevens,  is  "an  irresistible  impulse  to 
impress  all  its  sentiments  externally  by  the  crudest 


New  Racial  Characters  25 

and  most  obvious  medium."  Elsewhere  he  says  we 
are  "superficial,"  and  complains  of  our  "want  of 
thoroughness."  All  this  is  based  on  a  misapprehen- 
sion—  the  same  one  that  blinds  the  eastern  eye  on 
occasion  when  it  gazes  westward.  The  westerner, 
and  in  a  lesser  degree  every  American,  has  the  gift 
of  concentration,  and  he  has  the  defects  of  this 
great  quality.  He  sees  one  thing  at  a  time  —  the 
thing  that  he  is  trying  to  do.  Just  now  he  is  bent 
on  material  progress,  so  he  neglects  the  finer  arts  of 
civilization.  Our  critics  mistake  this  concentration 
of  our  efforts  on  one  thing  as  a  manifestation  of 
some  change  in  our  character,  as  if  a  boy  who  suc- 
cessively devoted  his  eager  attention  to  making  a 
hen-coop,  playing  ball,  and  studying  his  lessons, 
should  be  regarded,  by  a  solemn  observer,  as  chang- 
ing his  character  from  that  of  a  designer  and 
constructor  to  that  of  a  devotee  of  recreation  and 
again  to  that  of  a  student.  The  westerner  espe- 
cially bends  his  energies  to  what  is  before  him,  and 
he  recks  little  of  what  may  be  beyond  his  horizon. 
"  It  is  pathetic  and  exasperating,"  wrote  Richard 
Harding  Davis,  in  his  West  from  a  Car  Win- 
dow, when  Oklahoma  City  was  only  three  years 
old,  "  to  see  men  who  would  excel  in  a  great  metrop- 
olis .  .  .  wasting  their  energies  in  a  desert  of 
wooden  houses  in  the  middle  of  an  ocean  of  prairie, 
where  their  point  of  view  is  bounded  by  the  railroad 


26  The  Different  West 

tank  and  a  barb-wire  fence."  This  is  a  character- 
istic eastern  view.  That  Oklahoma  City  would  grow 
in  twenty  years'  time  into  the  large,  handsome,  well- 
ordered,  and  altogether  creditable  place  that  it  is 
today,  Mr.  Davis  probably  did  not  dream;  had  he 
done  so,  he  might  have  thought  that  the  work  of 
assisting  In  so  marvelous  a  development  was  great 
and  important  enough  even  for  "men  who  would 
excel  in  a  great  metropolis."  But  the  difference 
between  the  eastern  and  western  attitude  is  that  the 
westerner  sees  clearly  the  possibility  of  such  growth 
where  it  exists,  and  regards  the  attempt  to  realize  it 
as  something  worthy  of  his  best  endeavor.  He  may 
fail;  but  the  gambling  spirit  is  strong  enough  in  his 
veins  to  regard  this  only  as  an  additional  incentive. 
He  might  "  excel  in  a  great  metropolis  " ;  it  is  doubt- 
less his  intention  to  do  so;  but  he  prefers  that  the 
metropolis  should  be  one  of  his  own  building  —  a 
tour  de  force,  one  day  open  prairie  bounded  by  tank 
and  fence,  the  next  a  well-paved,  solidly  built  com- 
mercial and  residential  city. 

"No  one  ever  lost,"  said  a  great  American  finan- 
cier, "who  bet  on  the  United  States."  The  west- 
erner realizes  this  more  vividly  than  his  eastern 
brother,  and  he  Is  especially  ready  to  bet  on  the 
West.  His  faith  may  be  childlike,  but  his  winnings, 
so  far,  have  been  anything  but  juvenile. 

If  asked  to  state  briefly  the  salient  peculiarities  of 


Alliterative  Epithets 


the  West  as  distinguished  from  the  East,  the  man-in- 
the-street  of  New  York  or  Boston  would  probably 
reply,  after  some  cogitation,  that  it  is  "wild"  and 
"woolly."  Now  these  somewhat  vague  adjectives 
were  doubtless  chosen  at  the  outset  for  alliterative 
reasons — just  as  the  East  is  "effete"  largely  be- 
cause both  words  chance  to  begin  with  E.  But  there 
is  nothing  that  makes  an  adjective  so  sticky  as  allit- 
eration—  those  initial  letters  seem  to  have  hooks 
like  burrs  —  one  can  not  get  rid  of  them.  Their 
logical  applicability  is  quite  beside  the  mark. 

Shorn  of  alliterative  "  aptness,"  the  alleged  wild- 
ness  and  woolliness  of  the  West  seem  to  refer 
merely  to  the  fact  that  it  was  more  recently  settled 
than  the  East;  that  the  wave  of  colonization  moved 
westward,  not  eastward.  But  time  is  a  great  equal- 
izer. A  boy  of  five  and  one  of  fifteen  are  hardly 
in  the  same  century,  whereas  the  selfsame  individ- 
uals at  fifty  and  sixty  are  contemporaries.. .^q  the 
West  in  its  pioneer  days  was  in  a  different  age 
from  the  East — already  well  settled  and  civilized, 
whereas  a  time  must  inevitably  come  when  the  wave 
of  settlement  and  civilization  will  stand  as  high  on 
the  register  on  one  side  of  the  Alleghanies  as  on  the 
other.  Has  this  time  arrived?  This  much,  I  think, 
may  surely  be  said:  the  differences  between  West 
and  East  are  no  longer  due  to  the  fact  that  the  latter 
is  the  elder.    The  most  obvious  difference  between 


28  The  Different  West 

our  boys  of  five  and  fifteen  is  due  to  the  ten  years' 
seniority  of  the  latter;  when  they  are  sixty  and 
seventy  they  may  still  differ  in  marlced  degree,  but 
the  seniority,  while  it  remains  absolutely  the  same, 
has  become  relatively  unimportant. 

A  vast  deal  of  nonsense  has  been  and  is  still  talked 
about  "new  countries."  One  would  think  that  our 
emigrant  ancestors  at  once  retrograded  to  mon- 
keys when  they  touched  American  soil  and  that  we 
had  been  painfully  trying  to  get  back  our  ancestral 
British  manhood  ever  since;  also  that  our  more 
recent  sires  took  another  backward  step  in  the  evo- 
lutionary pathway  when  they  removed  to  Milwau- 
kee or  St.  Louis.  When  the  Latin  poet  said  that 
you  couldn't  change  a  man's  spirit  by  taking  him 
across  seas,  he  spoke  eternal  truth;  and  a  thousand 
miles  or  so  of  hill  and  prairie  are  similarly  powerless 
to  set  back  the  hands  on  the  dial  of  his  development. 
The  "civilization"  of  New  York  is  just  as  old  as 
that  of  London,  and  that  of  Chicago  is  as  ancient 
as  either.  They  are  different  —  but  the  difference 
is  not  one  of  seniority;  the  time  is  past  for  that. 

The  West,  in  fact,  has  taken  on  quite  as  "  old  "  an 
aspect  as  the  East.  It  seems  absurd  to  use  such  a 
word  of  New  York,  where  the  whole  city  above 
Canal  Street  has  sprung  up  almost  within  the  mem- 
ory of  those  now  living,  where  whole  districts  are 
leveled  to  the  ground  and  rebuilt  in  a  brief  tale  of 


"New"  Countries  29 

years,  and  where  vast  regions  in  the  Bronx,  covered 
one  day  with  pastures  and  truck  gardens,  are  trans- 
formed as  by  magic  in  a  few  months  into  soHdly 
built  blocks  with  paved  streets,  parks,  and  all  the 
concomitants  of  settled  city  life.  It  would  be  easy 
to  pick  out  tumble-down  districts  in  Chicago,  Mil- 
waukee, or  St.  Louis  far  older  in  atmosphere  than 
these.  As  for  smaller  places,  the  difference  lies,  per- 
haps, In  the  greater  decrepitude  or  lack  of  self- 
respect  of  certain  western  towns  and  villages.  It  is 
possible  for  a  New  England  town  to  remain  small 
for  a  century  without  losing  its  dignity  or  its  legiti- 
mate pride.  This  may  occur  also  in  the  West;  but 
in  the  large  majority  of  cases  it  would  seem  as  if 
failure  to  expand  carried  with  It  the  loss,  or  per- 
haps the  failure  to  acquire,  these  qualities.  These 
places  are  withered  before  they  are  ripe;  senility 
overtakes  them  before  they  have  enjoyed  a  well- 
considered  and  respectable  middle-age.  They  are 
slatternly,  dirty,  and  slack — and  no  one  cares;  why 
should  anyone  care,  since  the  place  hasn't  grown 
since  1873?  -^^^  <^his  the  East  misunderstands,  in 
much  the  same  way  as  Europe  misunderstands  us 
all  —  East  and  West  together.  To  the  European 
eye  we  are  all  crude,  unkempt,  and  slovenly  —  to- 
tally occupied  in  dollar-chasing.  Nor  is  this  the 
only  particular  in  which  the  East-and-West  relation 
is  similar  to  the  English-American. 


30  The  Different  West 

The  ability  of  eastern  people,  for  instance,  prop- 
erly to  estimate  those  from  the  West  suffers  from 
very  much  the  same  cause  that  makes  it  hard  for 
the  English  to  "place"  Americans.  In  England 
certain  things  very  nearly  always  go  together.  For 
instance,  certain  grades  of  education,  social  posi- 
tion, and  good-manners.  From  an  Englishman's 
manners  it  is  reasonably  easy  to  infer  at  once  his 
position  and  education,  and  from  his  education  his 
social  position  generally  follows.  It  used  to  be  so 
also  with  political  position  and  is  still  so  to  some 
extent.  Membership  in  the  House  of  Commons,  for 
instance,  once  always  implied  social  influence  and 
the  degree  and  kind  of  education  and  breeding  that 
went  with  it.  These  things  are  not  so  with  us,  and 
in  the  West  still  less  than  the  East.  The  English 
traveler  in  the  United  States  meets  a  man  of  good 
education  and  is  scandalized,  perhaps,  to  see  him 
eating  with  his  knife.  He  meets  a  Member  of  Con- 
gress and  is  surprised  to  hear  him  murder  the 
King's  English.  His  inferences  are  at  once,  though 
wrongly,  detrimental  to  this  country.  Placing  his  ac- 
quaintance In  the  English  class  in  which  his  higher 
grade  accomplishment  or  position  would  indicate 
that  he  belonged,  the  traveler  concludes  that  at  least 
some  members  of  that  class  In  America  are  far  below 
the  English  standard.  It  would,  of  course,  be 
equally  logical  to  "place"  the  man  by  his  low-grade 


Education  and  Manners  31 

accomplishment  and  then  conclude  that  members  of 
that  class  were  superior  to  the  corresponding  per- 
sons in  England.  For  instance,  instead  of  classing 
the  illiterate  congressman  with  the  English  polit- 
ically dominant  class,  it  would  be  possible  to  grade 
him  with  the  English  uneducated  class  and  then  point 
out  that  while  in  England  members  of  that  class 
do  not  usually  show  enough  ability  to  elevate  them 
to  elective  office,  they  frequently  do  so  in  the  United 
States. 

The  fallacy  in  both  ways  of  looking  at  the  facts 
lies,  of  course,  in  the  assumption  that  the  same 
things  characterize  the  same  classes  here  as  in 
England.  Nowhere  in  the  United  States  may  we 
infer  a  person's  social  or  political  standing  from  his 
education,  or  any  of  the  three  from  his  manners, 
but  it  is  possible  to  go  farther  in  this  direction  in 
the  East  than  in  the  West.  The  easterner  knows 
what  are  the  limitations  of  the  method  in  his  own 
section,  but  within  those  limitations  he  attempts  to 
employ  it  in  the  West  precisely  as  he  would  at 
home,  and  fails  in  the  same  way  the  Englishman 
does. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  westerner  may  make  the 
converse  mistake  in  the  East,  just  as  the  American 
does  in  England.  Unaccustomed  to  any  fixed  con- 
nection between  political  status,  social  position,  man- 
ners, and  education,  he  fails  to  infer  one  from  the 


32  The  Different  West 

other,  and  causes  the  same  astonishment  as  if  he 
had  failed  to  conclude  from  the  appearance  of  a 
man's  head  above  a  wall  that  a  man's  body  was 
beneath.  Human  heads  do  not  grow  in  England 
on  the  bodies  of  oxen  or  elephants  —  but  they  do 
in  America,  especially  in  western  America. 

Another  cause  of  misunderstanding  between  East 
and  West  is  the  inevitably  strained  relation  that 
always  exists  between  a  colonizing  and  a  colonized 
country,  or  part  of  a  country.  The  colonizers  be- 
come cool  a  little  before  the  colonists  do.  The  kit- 
ten is  still  looking  upon  the  mother-cat  with  trust 
and  affection  at  the  epochal  moment  when  the  latter, 
recognizing  that  the  time  for  dependence  is  over, 
turns  a  cold  shoulder  to  her  offspring  and  returns 
its  overtures  with  a  vicious  sputter  or  a  cuff  on  the 
ear.  This  doubtless  seems  rather  hard  to  the  kit- 
ten. "  Perhaps  you  were  right  to  dissemble  your 
love,"  she  might  quote,  "but  why  did  you  kick  me 
downstairs?"  It  is,  however,  the  way  of  the  world. 
We  loved  our  British  mother  dearly  when  she  began 
the  series  of  cuffs  and  sputterings  that  ultimately 
drove  us  from  her  door.  Even  when  she  was  fight- 
ing us  with  tooth  and  claw  and  we,  to  the  best  of 
our  Infant  ability,  were  biting  and  scratching  back, 
we  could  not  bear  to  think  that  it  might  all  result 
in  a  separation.  We  have  never  forgotten  that  we 
are  mother  and  daughter,  but  the  attitude  engen- 


Colonizers  and  Colonized  33 

dered  by  the  cuffings  and  scratchings  has  nev^er 
wholly  passed  away  —  the  superciliousness  on  the 
one  side  —  aptly  characterized  by  Lowell  as  "a  cer- 
tain condescension" — due  to  a  motherly  contempt 
for  kittenish  behavior,  remaining  long  after  it  has 
been  outgrown;  and  a  certain  amount  of  suspicion 
and  dislike,  curiously  mingled  with  respect  and 
admiration,  on  the  other  side. 

Now  as  a  general  rule  two  regions  on  an  east  and 
west  line  in  the  United  States  bear  to  each  other  the 
relation  of  colonizing  and  colonized  regions,  and  the 
feeling  between  them  shows  a  trace  of  that  relation. 
There  has  been  no  separation  and  there  have  been 
no  scratches  and  bites  —  except  perhaps  in  the  pub- 
lic press.  Despite  all  this,  however,  it  is  easy  for 
the  westerner  to  detect  in  the  East  the  same  attitude 
of  condescension  that  Lowell  noted  in  foreigners, 
and  his  own  attitude  is  correspondingly  marked  by 
what  may  be  called  a  reluctant  respect  tinged  with 
distrust.  The  condescension,  slight  as  it  may  be, 
involuntary  and  unnoticed  as  it  may  be  on  one  part, 
is  infallibly  detected  and  resented  on  the  other,  all 
the  more  as  the  conditions  and  relations  that  en- 
gendered it  have  long  been  outgrown. 

In  particular,  while  the  East  is  fully  cognizant  of 
the  West's  progress  and  while  her  increasing  regard 
and  appreciation  grows  with  this  progress,  what  the 
electricians   call   "hysteresis"    is   only   too   plainly 


34  The  Different  West 

visible  —  a  lagging  behind  of  the  appreciation  as 
compared  with  the  progress.  This  lag  may  be 
roughly  estimated  at  about  twenty-five  years:  the 
average  easterner  who  has  not  seen  for  himself  — 
and  some  who  have  seen,  but  not  with  the  eye  of 
understanding — thinks  of  Chicago,  St.  Louis,  and 
Kansas  City  as  they  were  about  1885,  or  even 
earlier.  He  does  not  know  for  instance  that  St. 
Louis  has  practically  abandoned  her  old  residence 
district  and  built  up  a  new  one  of  great  beauty,  dif- 
fering in  toto  from  the  old;  he  thinks  that  steam- 
boats still  run  up  the  Missouri  River;  he  knows 
nothing  of  the  great  playground  system  of  Chicago, 
with  its  wonderful  "  field-houses  "  putting  New  York 
and  Boston  to  shame;  he  is  incredulous  when  he 
hears  of  the  admirable  park  and  boulevard  system 
of  Kansas  City;  to  his  mind  the  great  and  growing 
western  state  universities  still  stand  as  they  did 
when  Michigan  was  the  only  one  worth  speaking  of. 
Washington  Avenue,  St.  Louis,  has  such  a  pave- 
ment as  Fifth  Avenue  never  had  and  possibly  never 
will  have;  but  he  thinks  of  it  as  deep  in  mud.  It 
was,  once ;  but  that  day  is  long  past. 

Charles  F.  Lummis,  himself  transplanted,  but 
almost  too  thoroughly  acclimatized,  says  that  the 
trouble  with  easterners  is  that  they  "  come  to  the 
West  with  their  brains  in  a  tin  can  —  and  they  forget 
to  bring  the  can-opener."     Going  back  to  our  elec- 


Contemplation  and  Actuality  35 

trical  metaphor,  this  simply  means  that  the  hystere- 
sis in  the  eastern  brain,  as  it  contemplates  things 
western,  is  regrettably  persistent.  It  may  seem 
curious,  or  even  inexplicable,  that  this  "lag"  so  evi- 
dent in  the  easterner  is  absent,  or  exists  to  a  very 
slight  degree,  in  the  westerner  as  he  contemplates 
the  East.  Sometimes  contemplation  runs  even 
ahead  of  actuality,  as  it  did  in  the  case  of  a  San 
Franciscan  acquaintance  of  mine  who  thought  he^ 
was  riding  through  the  New  York  subway  when 
the  surface-cars  took  him  through  the  old  Fourth 
Avenue  tunnel,  years  before  the  subway  was  run- 
ning. There  is  really  nothing  remarkable  about 
this.  The  line  of  relationships  between  two  places 
nearly  always  has  polarity  as  well  as  direction^Jts^ 
two  aspects  are  different.  The  New  Yorker  will  tell 
you  that  it  is  very  much  farther  from  New  York  to 
Brooklyn  than  it  is  from  Brooklyn  to  New  York. 
So  it  is  with  East  and  West.  The  westerner  is  only 
twenty- four  hours  from  Broadway;  the  Bostonian 
or  Philadelphian  is  generally  a  whole  lifetime  away 
from  Chicago  or  Kansas  City.  Xli^westerner  keeps 
in  touch  with  the  East  through  business-  trips,~and 
social  visits,  and  vacation  sojourns;  his  newspapers 
tell  him,  in  a  somewhat  distorted  way,  what  is  going 
on  there;  his  understanding  and  appreciation  of 
what  is  going  on  in  New  York  or  Washington  is 
quicker  and  juster  than  the  easterner's  of  what  is 


36  The  Different  West 

happening  in  Cincinnati  or  St.  Louis.  In  other 
words,  "lag"  is  slight;  there  is  little  or  no  hystere- 
sis. It  is  not  altogether  absent — but  that  is  for 
another  chapter. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  west's  misunderstanding  OF  THE  EAST 

"T  TRUST  you  won't  get  like  the  New  Yorkers," 
-*-  says  Honora's  aunt  to  her  in  Winston  Church- 
ill's last  (and  best)  book.  Honora  is  leaving  St. 
Louis  for  the  East. 

"Do  you  remember  how  stiff  they  were,  Tom? 
.  .  .  And  they  say  now  that  they  hold  their  heads 
higher  than  ever." 

"That,"  said  Uncle  Tom,  gravely,  "is  a  local 
disease,  and  comes  from  staring  at  the  high 
buildings." 

This  represents  pretty  accurately  the  average 
snap-judgment  of  westerners.  To  the  question 
"What  is  the  chief  characteristic  of  the  East?"  nine 
out  of  ten  would  be  apt  to  reply:  "The  people 
there  are  stiff."  Pressed  for  details,  the  speaker 
might  amplify  his  position  somewhat  thus :  "  They 
are  cold,  unresponsive,  unneighborly.  It  is  difficult 
to  get  acquainted  with  them.  They  have  no  depth 
of  emotion.  They  seem  to  be  considering  personal 
advantage  all  the  time."  And  more  of  the  same 
sort.  This  is  a  misconception,  as  every  easterner 
will  agree.     It  arises  from  a  false  inference  from 

37 


38  The  Different  West 

conduct  to  motive.  Judged  by  what  the  westerner 
is  accustomed  to  In  his  own  section,  the  easterner 
certainly  lays  himself  open  to  misconception  of  this 
kind,  but  in  this  instance,  as  in  others,  appearances 
are  deceitful.  Let  us  take  another  case :  The  Eng- 
lish books  tell  us  much  of  the  curious  Yankee  —  the 
man  who  Insists  on  inquiring  at  length  about  your 
intimate  affairs.  I  have  been  about  the  country  as 
much  as  most  persons  and  I  have  lived  many  years 
in  Yankeedom,  which  Is  the  land  of  my  forefathers; 
but  I  have  never  happened  to  meet  this  gentleman. 
Far  be  it  from  me  to  assert  that  he  does  not  exist 
He  may  once  have  been  a  type,  but  his  apparent 
curiosity,  I  will  venture  to  say,  was  not  curiosity  at 
all  —  only  compliance  with  what  he  Tegarded  as  a 
custom  of  courtesy.  Europeans  are  annoyed  by 
what  they  regard  as  the  impertinent  questions  of 
the  Chinese  when  members  of  that  race  inquire 
"Are  you  married?"  "Why  don't  you  get  mar- 
ried?" " How  many  children  have  you ? "  "Why 
don't  you  have  more?"  and  so  on.  The  Celestial 
is  simply  being  polite,  according  to  his  customs;  he 
doesn't  really  care  about  these  things  any  more 
than  did  the  old  Irishwoman  who  asked  "And  how 
is  your  health,  Mrs.  Mullaney?  Not  that  I  care 
a  snap;  but  only  to  make  conversation!" 

It  used  to  be  considered  polite  to  show  the  utmost 
interest  in  the  affairs  of  the  person  addressed;  now, 


Deceitful  Appearances  39 

that  interest  must  be  limited  to  his  health  and  that 
of  his  relatives.  Intimate  friends  may  go  farther; 
but  only  in  Oriental  circles  is  it  proper  to  inquire 
why  he  does  not  marry.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  a 
deadly  insult  to  ask  a  Mussulman  about  his  wives. 
Truly,  the  customs  of  courtesy  are  strange  things. 
They  differ  more  in  Europe  and  Asia  than  they  do 
in  Massachusetts  and  Missouri;  yet  even  in  two  of 
these  United  States  there  are  subtle  variations  that 
may  be  the  causes  of  serious  misapprehension.  If 
of  two  men  who  sit  down  with  you  in  the  smoking- 
room  of  a  Pullman,  one  enters  at  once  into  conver- 
sation while  the  other  sits  silent,  it  is  unjust  to  con- 
clude either  that  the  one  is  loquacious  or  that  the 
other  is  morose;  each  is  simply  doing  what  he  has 
been  taught  to  consider  the  polite  thing  under  the 
circumstances.  The  talkative  man  may  really  feel 
like  keeping  quiet;  the  silent  one  may  be  bursting 
with  speech.  Each  may  thus  be  sacrificing  his  in- 
clinations on  the  altar  of  politeness.  When  two  such 
men  meet,  each  sets  the  other  down  as  a  cad,  owing 
to  ignorance  of  causes. 

This  is  why  a  certain  kind  of  easterner  and  a 
certain  kind  of  westerner,  who  may  or  may  not  be 
typical,  make  a  mistake  when  they  conclude,  respect- 
ively, that  the  easterner  is  a  cold,  silent  fish,  with- 
out feeling,  and  that  the  westerner  is  a  man  who 
presses  himself  upon  his  neighbor  with  unnecessary 


40  (The  Different  West 

insistence.  Their  conceptions  of  human  intercourse 
are  different — that  is  all.  The  westerner  is  the 
more  human  and  the  less  artificial;  he  may  congratu- 
late himself  on  that;  but  the  easterner,  underneath 
his  mantle  of  aloofness,  assumed  purely  as  a  mat- 
ter of  custom,  may,  in  reality  and  by  nature,  have 
quite  as  much  cordial  feeling  as  the  other. 

There  is  a  condition  of  things  where  two  human 
beings,  meeting  for  the  first  time,  at  once  find  them- 
selves not  only  on  a  footing  of  acquaintance,  but  of 
mutual  confidence  and  intimacy.  For  instance,  these 
two  individuals  may  be  alone  and  in  a  position  of 
danger;  they  may  be  travelers  in  the  frozen  North 
or  the  wilds  of  Africa ;  they  may  stand  together  on 
the  roof  of  a  burning  house  or  on  a  floating  ice- 
floe. In  such  situations  the  ordinary  standards  of 
intercourse  and  customs  of  courtesy  are  thrown  to 
the  winds.  Many  a  novelist  has  utilized  this  fact, 
as  we  all  know.  The  reason  for  it  is  that  the  con- 
trast with  the  harsh  conditions  of  nature  emphasizes 
the  common  humanity  of  the  two  strangers  and  mini- 
mizes all  the  differences  between  them  that  might 
have  made  cooperation,  or  even  mere  acquaintance, 
impossible  under  normal  conditions.  In  a  less  de- 
gree this  same  force  draws  together  two  civilized 
men  among  savages,  two  Europeans  in  Asia,  or  even 
two  Americans  in  England.  Now  the  westerner  is 
not  so  far  removed  in  time  from  a  state  of  society 


Conditions  of  Intimacy  41 

where  relations  such  as  these  obtained  generally  as 
is  the  easterner.  The  ancestors  of  both  were  in  a 
case  when  they  were  glad,  in  their  primitive  wilder- 
ness, to  give  a  hearty  welcome  to  a  casual  comer  and 
make  friends  with  him  shortly,  but  the  necessity  for 
this  ceased  a  century  ago  in  the  East,  while  it  per- 
sisted in  the  West  perhaps  fifty  years  longer.  And 
while  it  persisted  it  set  the  standard,  even  for  those 
personally  unaffected  by  it.  Hence  it  has  been  con- 
sidered the  proper  thing  much  longer  in  the  West 
than  in  the  East  to  speak  to  the  casual  stranger,  with 
whom  one  is  thrown  on  a  journey  or  by  any  other 
chance,  and  to  make  of  him  a  temporary  friend.  In 
the  East  this  custom  has  largely  passed,  and  two 
men  who  meet  thus  estimate  each  other's  perma- 
nent possibilities  of  comradeship  before  they  do 
more  than  pass  the  time  of  day. 

A  westerner  once  stated  the  case  thus:  In  the 
West  we  assume  that  a  man  is  well  bred  and  com- 
panionable until  he  proves  himself  the  contrary;  if 
he  does  so  disappoint  us,  we  drop  him,  of  course. 
But  in  the  East  a  stranger  is  assumed  to  be  objec- 
tionable until  he  shows  himself  to  be  otherwise,  and 
until  he  comes  forward  with  his  proofs  he  is  a 
pariah.  To  a  people  that  prides  itself,  even  over- 
much, on  holding  a  man  innocent  till  his  guilt  is 
proved,  this  way  of  putting  it  will  appeal  strongly; 
yet  both  attitudes  are  quite  logical.     The  eastern 


42  The  Different  West 

attitude,  however,  is  adapted  to  a  well  inhabited 
country  whose  citizens  brush  up  against  each  other 
constantly;  it  is  not  fitted  for  a  sparsely  settled 
region  where  it  would  be  difficult  to  establish  one's 
antecedents  and  relationships.  I  once  ran  up  against 
an  unknown  cousin  on  a  railroad  train  in  Kansas; 
but  that  was  an  unlikely  chance,  whereas  in  a  New 
England  community  one  has  to  tread  warily  to  avoid 
stepping  on  the  toes  of  all  sorts  of  blood  relations. 

Now  the  West  is  indeed  no  longer  sparsely  set- 
tled; the  conditions  there  today  are  not  widely 
different  from  those  in  the  East;  yet  just  because 
the  customs  engendered  by  other  conditions  have 
not  had  so  much  time  to  adjust  themselves,  the  west- 
erner is  friendly  and  the  easterner  comparatively 
wary,  and  the  former  will  naturally  regard  the  lat- 
ter as  hostile  and  forbidding  unless  he  knows  some- 
thing of  social  causes. 

A  westerner,  in  whose  judgment  I  have  confi- 
dence, surprised  me  the  other  day  by  some  remarks 
about  the  East.  Had  I  remained  simply  one  of  his 
eastern  friends,  doubtless  I  should  not  have  heard 
them;  but  transplantation  brings  many  experiences, 
and  the  pleasure  of  hearing  an  impartial  estimate 
of  one's  former  neighbors  is  one  of  them 

The  East,  said  my  friend,  was  full  of  lazy  and 
incompetent  persons;  one  saw  them  on  every  hand 
in  passing  through  New  England  or  the  Middle 


Two  Attitudes  43 


States.  It  could  not  be  otherwise,  he  went  on;  all 
the  wideawake,  able  citizens  had  abandoned  those 
effete  regions  and  had  moved  to  the  West,  where 
alone  one  may  now  travel  about  without  having 
one's  vision  offended  with  slatternliness,  incompe- 
tency, and  laziness.  I  could  not  help  a  sly  glance 
to  see  whether  he  was  not  joking  —  but  he  was  as 
solemn  as  a  judge,  and  his  tone  rasped  a  little  with 
that  asperity  that  I  have  often  heard  in  western 
judgments  of  the  East.  So  I  merely  agreed  with 
him  to  avoid  argument  and  wondered  at  the  lament- 
able blindness  of  sectional  feeling.  It  must  be 
that  at  the  end  our  population,  stirred  by  the  inces- 
sant whipping  of  our  railway  trains,  will  be  lashed 
out  of  such  parochialism.  Then  perhaps  Americans 
will  not  believe  that  every  Englishman  drops  his 
Ks;  Englishmen  will  not  be  sure  that  the  Penn- 
treaty  Indians  still  live  in  Philadelphia.  Then,  too, 
citizens  of  distant  sections  of  the  United  States  will 
not  credit  all  sorts  of  absurd  things  about  each 
other. 

My  friend's  argument  was,  it  Is  true,  quite  valid; 
but  not  as  between  the  East  and  the  West  as  we 
have  defined  it.  As  before  noted,  these  sections  are 
approaching  each  other  in  relative  age.  It  stands 
good  only  In  the  comparison  of  an  older  community 
with  one  In  Its  earlier  generations,  perhaps  I  should 
have  said  In  Its  original  or  first  generation  —  a  Wyo- 


44  The  Different  West 

ming  cowboy  district  of  the  seventies,  perhaps. 
Such  a  district  has  no  timid  citizens,  no  lazy  ones, 
no  incompetents  —  that  is,  when  the  particular  kind 
of  competence  valid  in  those  regions  is  meant.  But 
as  soon  as  there  is  marriage  and  the  begetting  of 
children  the  law  of  atavism  asserts  itself;  some  of 
the  children  inherit  their  father's  traits,  but  others 
go  back  to  those  of  their  grandsirea — those  in- 
competent and  lazy  persons  left  behind  in  the  East. 
And  in  the  West  this  atavistic  process  has  now 
gone  on  for  many  generations.  Added  to  the  mix- 
ing action  of  our  easy  transportation  systems  it  has 
brought  about  a  ratio  of  incompetency  to  compe- 
tency, of  laziness  to  industry,  and  of  cowardice  to 
courage,  that  is  not  very  far  different  from  that 
obtaining  on  the  Atlantic  coast.  We  have  here  one 
of  the  few  instances  of  the  "hysteresis"  defined  in 
the  last  chapter,  operating  in  the  West  —  the  lag  of 
thought  that  throws  back  conditions,  in  mental  ap- 
preciation, to  what  they  were  a  decade,  a  lustrum, 
or  even  a  century  ago. 

Another  source  of  western  misconception  of  the 
East  is  the  tendency  to  take  the  East  at  its  own 
valuation.  This  is  perhaps  most  noticeable  only 
among  those  who  have  not  visited  the  East,  but  it 
extends  further  than  this.  The  East,  of  course, 
thinks  that  the  history  of  the  United  States  is  that 
of  the   Atlantic   coast.     The   parochial   doings   of 


The  East's  Self-appreciation  45 

petty  magistrates  are  of  vast  concern  there,  but  what 
was  happening  in  other  parts  of  the  continent  at 
the  same  time  does  not  matter;  those  regions  are 
worth  noticing  only  when  they  become  part  of  the 
Union.  This  is  particularly  the  case  in  New  Eng- 
land. There  are  many  good  citizens  of  Massachu- 
setts who  think  that  nine-tenths  of  all  the  important 
things  that  ever  happened  to  our  country  occurred 
in  that  state.  As  for  Boston,  Dr.  Holmes's  remark 
about  the  Hub  of  the  Universe,  which  has  passed 
into  our  literature  as  a  pleasantry,  is  no  joke  to 
many,  but  sober  earnest. 

It  is  curious  to  see  these  views  accepted  calmly, 
without  surprise  or  resentment,  by  westerners,  in 
somewhat  the  same  spirit  as  the  traditional  account 
of  the  Noachian  flood  is  accepted  by  many.  In  par- 
ticular, the  primacy  of  Boston  seems  to  be  unques- 
tioned. It  is  assumed  that  all  New  Englanders  have 
the  same  reverence  for  that  town  that  is  felt  by 
her  own  citizens ;  that  they  are  familiar  with  the  city 
and  accept  its  claims  as  meekly  as  the  English  do 
those  of  London.  To  some  extent,  it  is  assumed 
that  any  easterner  will  entertain  like  feelings. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  all  easterners,  except  possibly 
the  Bostonians  themselves,  are  familiar  with  the 
resentment  felt  everywhere  with  the  Boston  attitude 
and  claims.  There  are  other  cities  in  the  East  and 
there  are  even  a  few  in  New  England.     Capitals 


46  The  Different  West 

like  Hartford  and  Providence,  towns  like  Portland, 
New  Haven,  and  Burlington  —  all  have  something 
to  say  on  the  subject.  Just  as  there  is  no  one  city 
related  to  the  United  States  as  London  to  England 
or  Paris  to  France,  so  there  is  no  one  town  bearing 
this  relationship  to  the  whole  of  New  England. 

Big  things  show  best  at  a  distance,  and  there  is 
lack  of  knowledge  throughout  the  West  of  the  char- 
acteristics of  small  eastern  towns.  Places  like 
Springfield,  Mass.,  Scranton,  Pa.,  or  Rochester, 
N.  Y.,  have  ten  times  the  individuahty  of  a  huge 
metropolis  like  New  York.  The  individuality  is  less 
marked  In  western  towns  of  this  size;  hence  the 
western  Inability  to  place  such  communities  properly 
in  the  scheme  of  things  eastern. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   west's   political   UNREST 

npHE  widening  movement  of  the  strip  of  states, 
•*-  which  has  carried  its  western  edge  continually 
farther  westward,  has  not  been  unchecked.  It  has 
paused  more  than  once  at  natural  obstacles  until  the 
colonizing  motor-force  could  gather  strength  to 
surmount  them  or  burst  through  them.  So  the  tide 
stopped  for  a  time  at  the  AUeghanies,  again  at  the 
Mississippi,  again  at  the  Rockies,  and  in  the  "Great 
American  Desert."  There  have  been  times,  then, 
when  the  regions  on  either  side  of  these  particular 
boundaries  have  with  more  than  usual  appropriate- 
ness been  known  as  "East"  and  "West."  It  was 
during  the  first  of  these  pauses  that  the  typical 
"western"  spirit  of  uneasiness,  unrest,  and  dis- 
satisfaction first  found  expression  in  open  violence, 
in  what  is  called  "  the  Whisky  Insurrection."  Here 
the  "East"  put  down  the  "West"  by  force  of 
arms  —  a  feat  that  it  has  never  since  been  called 
upon  to  perform,  though  it  is  difficult  to  say  what 
might  have  happened  if  the  greater  differences 
between  North  and  South  had  not  thrown  all  others 
into  the  shade  during  just  those  years  when  the 

47 


48  The  Different  West 

East-West  boundary  was  shifting  westward.  Even 
since  the  close  of  that  contest  it  has  been  predicted, 
now  and  again,  that  East  and  West  would  one  day 
also  come  to  blows.  In  a  book  of  Impressions 
of  America,  published  in  London  in  1868,  Mr. 
George  Rose,  an  English  observer,  speaks  confi- 
dently of  "  the  coming  struggle  "  between  these  two 
sections,  and  uses  these  words : 

Whenever  these  two  incarnations  of  self  —  the  western 
and  eastern  men  —  shall  come  into  collision,  then  will 
human  nature  be  seen  in  its  basest  colors :  then  will 
avarice,  envy,  and  hatred,  ranked  on  both  sides,  meet  in 
a  deadly  conflict,  the  horrors  of  which  will  be  unmiti- 
gated by  either  fear  of  God  or  human  respect. 

We  may  smile  at  this,  but  it  is  unique  rather  in 
its  wording  than  in  its  underlying  idea. 

To  return  to  the  Whisky  Insurrection,  this  first 
and  most  explosive  of  eastern  and  western  differ- 
ences has  left  its  Impress  on  that  particular  part  of 
the  country  where  it  occurred.  Whatever  differ- 
ences there  may  be  between  East  and  West,  they 
exist  almost  as  strongly  between  eastern  and  western 
Pennsylvania  as  between  New  York  and  Indiana. 
Philadelphia  and  Pittsburgh  are  hardly  in  the  same 
country  and  the  local  feeling  between  the  two  sec- 
tions has  more  than  once  given  expression  to  a 
sentiment  that  the  State  should  be  divided.  Pos- 
sibly only  our  American  love  for  bigness  still  keeps 


Sectional  Hostility  49 

the  great  State  of  Pennsylvania  a  unit.  The  antago- 
nism that  was  at  the  bottom  of  the  Whisky  Insur- 
rection, however,  moved  westward  with  the  moving 
east-and-west  line  of  division.  At  bottom  it  was  the 
feeling  that  the  stronger  East  was  not  fair  to  the 
West;  that  it  was  doing  things  in  the  way  that  was 
best  for  itself  rather  than  for  the  country  as  a 
whole;  that  it  was  opinionated,  intolerant,  and 
altogether  irritating.  As  the  West  grew  stronger, 
the  shifting  line  added  more  and  more  territory  to 
what  came  to  be  considered  as  "The  East."  This 
territory  assumed  "eastern"  ways  and  eastern 
modes  of  thought,  and  the  eastern  preponderance 
was  thus  maintained.  It  was  the  old  story  of  the 
Socialist  who  modifies  his  opinions  as  he  becomes 
a  large  property-holder,  of  the  pedestrian  whose 
point  of  view  changes  when  he  buys  an  automo- 
bile, of  the  British  Whig  politician  who  becomes  a 
Tory  when  he  is  raised  to  the  peerage.  And  in 
addition  to  this  political  preponderance  of  mere 
voting  strength  there  came  to  be  added  a  financial 
preponderance  that  was  even  more  irritating. 

The  way  in  which  the  West  regards  the  East  has 
thus  apparently  a  somewhat  complex  source  —  so- 
cial, political,  and  economic  —  but  at  bottom  these 
are  all  very  much  the  same. 

Politically  the  restlessness  of  the  West  has  always 
manifested  itself  in  eagerness  to  enter  into  move- 


50  The  Different  West 

ments  for  reform,  sometimes  with  rather  ill- 
considered  haste,  in  refusal  to  follow  leaders  of 
social  prominence,  in  the  hasty  setting  up  and  pull- 
ing down  of  popular  idols.  Movements  from  below 
upward,  instead  of  from  above  downward,  have 
been  apt  to  sway  it.  Its  leading  men,  willy-nilly, 
have  gone  with  the  masses  oftener  than  they  have 
persuaded  the  masses  to  follow  them.  It  cannot  be 
said,  perhaps,  that  reform  movements  have  been 
more  effective  in  the  West  than  in  the  East.  There 
have  been  rotten  municipal  governments,  senatorial 
election-scandals,  wholesale  bribery,  in  both  sections. 
It  is  rather  the  way  in  which  reform  movements 
are  conceived  and  carried  on  that  marks  the  differ- 
ence between  them. 

For  instance,  the  abolition  movement  in  Boston 
was  at  the  outset  a  movement  of  socially  prominent 
persons.  The  mob  was  against  it.  When  it  was 
triumphant  it  was  because  its  leaders  had  brought 
the  mob  around.  The  "Liberal  Republican"  move- 
ment that  resulted  in  the  nomination  of  Horace 
Greeley  was  similarly  from  above  downward;  it  did 
not  get  far  enough  downward,  in  fact,  to  win  the 
votes.  So  with  the  innumerable  campaigns  against 
Tammany,  which  have  been  largely  led  by  "  silk- 
stockings."  So  with  the  policies  identified  in  New 
York  with  the  administration  of  Governor  Hughes. 
This  state  of  things  has  always  given  color  to  the 


Reform  from  Below  51 

assertion  by  machine-men,  stand-patters,  Tammany- 
ites,  etc.,  that  their  opponents  were  self-righteous 
Pharisees — "holier-than-thou"  men,  undemocratic, 
and  opposed  to  popular  government.  Just  after  one 
of  the  earlier  periodical  overturns  of  Tammany  in 
New  York,  a  professor  in  Columbia  University 
remarked  that  he  found  suddenly  that  he  began  to 
have  the  pleasure  of  knowing  a  large  number  of  city 
office-holders.  There  had  been,  in  fact,  a  social 
revolution.  Tammany  had  been  overturned  from 
above  downward,  which  is  the  one  very  good  reason 
why  it  never  stays  upset.  Tamen  usque  recurret, 
which  may  be  read  as  a  pun  or  not,  just  as  you 
choose. 

Curiously  enough,  one  of  the  places  where  it  is 
easiest  and  most  instructive  to  compare  eastern  with 
western  spirit  and  methods  is  at  the  great  eastern 
universities,  which  for  reasons  that  need  not  be  dis- 
cussed here,  are  those  that  draw  their  students  most 
generally  from  all  parts  of  the  country.  For  this 
reason,  it  may  be  said  in  passing,  a  man  may  well 
decide  to  send  his  son  to  Harvard  or  Yale  or  Prince- 
ton, rather  than  to  a  local  eastern  college  like 
Amherst  or  Williams,  or  to  one  of  the  great  west- 
ern state  universities,  like  Wisconsin  or  Illinois. 
The  opportunity  that  one  gets  at  a  continental  as 
opposed  to  a  local  institution,  to  live  and  exchange 
opinions  daily  with  north,   south,   east,   and  west, 


52  The  Different  West 

may  well  outweigh  considerations  based  on  curricu- 
lum, size,  situation,  or  administration.  It  is  greatly 
to  be  regretted  that  since  the  Civil  War  southerners 
do  not  flock  to  these  universities  as  they  used  to  do. 
So  far  as  I  know  there  is  no  institution,  unless  it 
may  be  Johns  Hopkins,  where  one  may  meet  large 
numbers  of  persons  from  both  North  and  South. 
For  the  East  and  the  West,  however,  what  has  been 
said  holds  good.  I  well  remember  that  my  first 
class  reunion  at  Yale  was  held  in  the  stress  of  the 
Mugwump  secession  from  Blaine  to  Cleveland  in 
1884,  and  the  Impression  is  still  strong  of  the  dif- 
ferent attitudes  toward  it  of  my  classmates  from  the 
East  and  from  the  West.  The  class  was  Repub- 
lican by  a  large  majority  —  so  large  that  when  we 
formed  campaign  marching  clubs  in  the  Garfield- 
Hancock  contest  of  senior  year,  the  Democrats  had 
just  enough  men  for  officers  —  there  were  none  left 
for  the  rank  and  file.  Almost  without  exception, 
among  my  own  friends,  the  western  Republicans 
were  Blaine  men,  and  the  easterners  were  Mug- 
wumps. And  neither  could  at  all  understand  the 
attitude  of  the  others.  It  was  In  the  eastern  and 
western  air.  Possibly  this  may  seem  quite  contra- 
dictory of  what  has  been  just  said.  Not  at  all. 
We  represented  the  top,  not  the  bottom.  "  Mug- 
wumpery,"  which  has  grown  powerful  under  vary- 
ing names,  is  today  stronger  in  the  West  than  in 


Political  Movements  53 

the  East.  My  western  friends,  some  of  them  high 
in  the  councils  of  their  parties,  have  been  dragged 
into  it  by  forces  from  below,  so  far  as  they  have 
not  been  able  to  resist  these  by  "  standing  pat." 
The  easterners  have  not  generally  been  able  to 
carry  the  masses  with  them  into  insurgency.  Where 
this  has  been  done,  as  in  New  Hampshire,  it  has 
been  distinctly  by  successful  leading  from  above,  not 
by  a  mass-movement  from  below. 

Now  compare,  if  you  please,  with  the  eastern 
movements  to  which  we  have  briefly  alluded,  west- 
ern ones  like  the  sudden  rise  of  the  Populists,  the 
recent  successes  of  the  Socialist  party  in  various 
cities,  the  influence  of  Bryan,  the  reform  of  the 
tariff,  the  commission  form  of  government,  the  so- 
called  "  Insurgent "  movement,  with  its  corollary 
the  Progressive  party  —  the  idolizing  of  Roosevelt. 
To  a  much  greater  extent  than  the  corresponding 
eastern  movements,  these  had  their  origin  in  popular 
sentiment,  which  had  well  leavened  the  masses  and 
made  them  ready  to  accept  leadership  when  it 
appeared.  This  sort  of  thing,  of  course,  puts  a  pre- 
mium on  hypocrisy  among  political  leaders;  men 
like  La  Follette  in  Wisconsin  and  Cummins  in  Iowa 
have  been  accused  of  it:  but  if  these  accusations  be 
true  they  are  only  additional  evidence  of  the  way 
in  which  the  western  movements  arise. 

Occasionally  the  West  tries  the  eastern  plan  of 


54  The  Different  West 

organizing  reform  from  the  top,  and  the  failure  of 
such  attempts  is  sufficient  proof  that  they  are  exotic. 
Two  conspicuous  recent  instances  are  the  defeat*  of 
Professor  Merriam  for  the  mayoralty  of  Chicago 
and  the  rejection  at  the  polls  of  a  new  charter  for 
the  city  of  St.  Louis.  Both  the  candidacy  of  Pro- 
fessor Merriam  and  the  new  charter  were,  actually 
or  reputedly,  it  makes  little  difference  which,  aristo- 
cratic in  their  origin  and  tendencies.  The  success 
of  both  would  have  made  for  civic  righteousness 
and  advancement;  failure  in  each  case  was  a  dis- 
aster, and  it  may  be  set  down  to  the  credit  of  those 
who  have  apparently  forgotten  that  in  the  West, 
nothing,  no  matter  how  good,  can  be  forced  on  the 
people  from  above. 

The  fate  of  various  elaborate  city  plans  may  be 
similarly  explained.  It  seems  to  have  been  assumed 
in  various  quarters  that  an  imitation  of  certain 
externals  in  other  cities  will  bring  about  a  corre- 
sponding change  in  fundamentals.  For  instance, 
there  is  little  spectacular  street  and  cafe  night-life 
in  St.  Louis  —  a  fact  much  to  its  credit.  Its  citizens 
have  attractive  homes  and  prefer  to  spend  their 
evenings  therein.  But  business  men  often  lament 
this  state  of  things  because  it  makes  deficient  the 
entertainment  of  traveling  salesmen  and  buyers. 
An  imitation  of  New  York's  "Tenderloin"  is  evi- 
dently required.     The  brilliant  street-lighting  being 


City  Plans  55 

the  most  obvious  feature  of  that  celebrated  district, 
it  has  been  assumed  that  if  sufficient  light  were  pro- 
vided, all  the  rest  would  follow,  oblivious  of  the  fact 
that  the  light  in  New  York  is  a  product  of  the 
Tenderloin  life,  not  its  cause.  Considerable  sums 
have  thus  been  spent  not  only  in  St.  Louis,  but  in 
other  cities,  on  brilliant  street-lighting,  much  to  the 
improvement  of  the  streets,  of  course,  but  absolutely 
without  the  creation  of  a  "  Tenderloin." 

So  with  "  city  planning."  The  real  "  city  beauti- 
ful" is  usually  an  outgrowth  of  conditions,  and  the 
creation  of  certain  architectural  features  will  not 
serve  to  create  also  these  conditions.  The  mag- 
nificent civic  improvements  planned  by  architects 
for  the  great  western  cities  are  not  only  largely 
impractical  on  account  of  expense,  but  they  do  not 
correspond  to  any  need  felt  by  the  great  body  of 
the  citizens.  The  practical  way,  and  the  one  that 
accords  with  western  ideas  and  methods,  is  to  bring 
about  a  change  of  public  opinion  in  regard  to  one 
detail  after  another  that  is  making  the  city  ugly, 
and  so  transform  it  gradually,  instead  of  trying  to 
replace  a  section  of  it  with  a  section  of  Paris, 
leaving  the  rest  untouched. 

It  is  a  pleasure  to  turn  to  a  set  of  institutions 
that  have  been  initiated  and  carried  forward  in  a  way 
more  consonant  with  western  ideas.  These  are  the 
city  clubs,  organizations,  generally  of  younger  men, 


56  The  Different  West 

whose  object  is  thoroughly  to  ventilate  all  ques- 
tions relating  to  civic  matters,  without  taking  sides 
in  any  of  them.  These  bodies  are  catholic  in  their 
membership  and  are  beginning  at  the  bottom  in 
quite  the  proper  way.  Much  may  be  expected  from 
these  and  similar  efforts. 

It  has  been  intimated  above  that  the  West  is  more 
democratic  than  the  East.  Democracy  must  have 
leaders,  but  it  makes  a  great  deal  of  difference 
whether  those  leaders  be  chosen  or  self-imposed. 
Geographical  conditions  doubtless  have  something 
to  do  with  these  differences.  Democracy  can  not 
flourish  well  under  fear  of  foreign  invasion,  and  this 
fear,  whether  consciously  or  not,  is  an  inherited 
habit  of  mind  on  every  sea-coast.  Plainsmen,  and 
dwellers  in  the  river-bottoms,  like  mountaineers, 
"  are  always  freemen."  It  will  not  do,  of  course, 
to  push  this  idea  too  far,  but  it  may  be  noted  that 
just  after  the  civil  war,  when  militarism  reigned 
supreme,  in  the  Mississippi  Valley  as  on  the  Coast, 
the  popular  movements  that  have  always  character- 
ized the  West  practically  ceased  to  arise.  Every- 
body seemed  to  be  "standing  pat,"  and  the  military 
insurgency  of  the  South,  by  its  effect  on  those  who 
helped  to  put  it  down,  seemed  to  have  had  a  blight- 
ing effect,  for  the  time  being,  on  western  political 
insurgency. 

It  has  been  made  clear,  I  trust,  that  the  western 


Western  Democracy  57 

democracy  does  not  reject  leaders;  on  the  contrary, 
it  idolizes  them  and  follows  them  blindly.  But  they 
are  its  own  leaders,  and  they  stand  for  its  own  prin- 
ciples—  the  simple  secret  of  their  influence.  The 
two  patent  examples  in  recent  times  are  William  J. 
Bryan  and  Theodore  Roosevelt.  Belonging  to 
nominally  opposed  political  parties,  each  has  repre- 
sented the  popular  and  radical  wing  of  his  party 
and  has  stood  especially  for  those  ideas  that  are 
rife  in  the  West.  Bryan  has  openly  accused  Roose- 
velt of  stealing  his  policies.  It  would  be  nearer  the 
truth  to  say  that  both  have  borrowed  those  policies 
from  western  public  opinion.  Roosevelt  usurped 
Bryan's  place  in  the  western  heart  because  he  was 
successful.  Democracy  adores  success  and  looks  for 
a  leader  that  can  succeed;  it  will  depose  one  after 
another  till  it  finds  him.  Whether  Roosevelt's  fail- 
ure to  secure  a  third  term  in  the  presidential  chair 
will  hurt  his  western  popularity,  remains  to  be  seen. 
Possibly  not;  for  his  successes  in  the  late  campaign 
were  in  the  West;  his  failures  in  the  East.  The 
essential  "  westernness "  of  Roosevelt  has  often 
been  remarked.  For  years  his  personality  has  been 
the  one  political  subject  that  would  stir  up  a  social 
gathering  in  the  East.  We  may  refuse  to  be  moved 
by  the  tariff,  or  imperialism,  or  the  prospects  of  a 
war  with  Japan;  but  if  somebody  says  "  Roosevelt," 
everyone  is  in  arms  at  once  —  the  East  generally  on 


58  The  Different  West 

one  side,  and  the  West  on  the  other.  Anti-Roosevelt 
westerners  usually  turn  out  to  have  railroad  or  cor- 
poration connections.  I  have  traveled  day  after 
day  in  a  suburban  train  to  and  from  New  York 
when  everyone  in  my  car  was  discussing  Roosevelt  — 
and  the  first  syllable  of  that  word  might  well  be 
omitted.  The  curses  in  this  case  were  loud  as  well 
as  deep:  the  one  or  two  Roosevelt  advocates  in  the 
car  were  fairly  scared  into  silence.  Yet  at  this  time 
the  general  popularity  of  Roosevelt  throughout  the 
country  was  unexampled,  and  it  was  particularly 
the  West  that  was  its  seat.  We  hear  much  of  the 
compelling  effect  of  his  magnetic  personality,  but 
that  never  seemed  to  count  for  much  among  the 
Wall  Street  crowd;  and  if  Roosevelt  had  been 
another  Ballinger,  it  would  have  gone  for  nothing 
among  his  present  admirers  of  the  Middle  West, 
although  it  has  undoubtedly  added  to  the  general 
effect. 

No;  Roosevelt's  present  position  (for  he  still 
holds  it  as  a  western  leader),  like  Bryan's  former 
position,  is  due  to  the  fact  that  he  is  an  exponent 
of  policies  that  fall  in  with  the  peculiar  political 
unrest  of  which  we  have  been  speaking. 

I  shall  doubtless  be  reminded  here  that  Bryan's 
influence  rose  on  the  crest  of  the  free-silver  wave, 
and  that  Roosevelt  has  always  been  a  consistent 
opponent  of  free  silver.     Precisely;  and  the  substi- 


Theodore  Roosevelt  59 

tution  of  Roosevelt's  Influence  for  Bryan's  coincides 
with  the  abandonment  of  the  free-silver  idea  in  the 
West.  Political  unrest  focused  itself  for  a  brief 
time  on  this  point  and  then  dropped  it  when  it  was 
unsuccessful.  In  this  abandonment  of  the  West's 
once  dominant  idea,  Theodore  Roosevelt  played 
absolutely  no  part  at  all. 

In  attempting  to  sum  up  the  West's  political 
unrest,  I  am  reminded  of  Professor  Franklin  Gid- 
dings'  answer  to  the  editor  of  a  Socialist  paper 
who  asked  him  if  he  were  of  the  faith.  Professor 
Giddings  said  (I  quote  from  memory)  :  "If  belief 
in  what  Socialists  are  trying  to  do,  as  opposed  to 
the  ways  in  which  they  are  trying  to  do  it,  makes 
one  a  Socialist,  then  I  am  a  Socialist."  This,  I 
take  it,  is  the  fundamental  attitude  of  the  West, 
whether  fully  acknowledged  or  not,  and  the  leaven 
is  working  eastward,  also.  The  assets  of  Socialism 
are  two  —  its  grievance,  which  is  a  universal  one, 
and  its  offer  of  a  definite  cure.  This  cure  is  of  the 
nature  of  a  panacea,  the  age-long  stand-by  of  the 
quack.  The  scientific  physician  knows  that  there  is 
no  such  thing;  he  realizes  that  every  malady  must 
be  studied  and  treated  by  itself.  The  suffering 
patient  knows  this  too,  perhaps  —  theoretically;  yet 
if  he  is  on  his  last  legs  and  the  quack  comes  along 
with  his  cure-all,  the  patient  is  very  apt  to  give  it  a 
trial.     So,  when  we  are  on  our  last  legs,  we  may 


6o  The  Different  West 

turn  in  despair  to  the  Socialistic  cure-all  —  probably 
not  otherwise.  Meanwhile,  Socialists  of  varying 
schools  are  proposing  all  sorts  of  policies  and  expe- 
dients that  they  conceive  to  be  consonant  with,  or 
to  be  steps  toward,  their  general  plan.  Some  of 
these  are  obviously  good,  some  doubtful,  some 
foolish,  and  some  mischievous.  The  American 
people,  especially  in  the  West,  are  approving  and 
adopting  many  of  these,  and  those  who  do  not  like 
it  are  shouting  "  Socialism  I  "  This  cry  is  not  fright- 
ening westerners  at  all,  and  I  do  not  believe  that 
it  will  ultimately  frighten  anyone,  east  or  west. 
Latin  nations  are  apt  to  give  their  adherence  to 
general  principles  and  then  blindly  accept  whatever 
policy  may  seem  to  correspond  with  them.  Anglo- 
Saxons  have  never  done  this;  they  examine  each 
policy  on  its  merits  and  adopt  it  if  they  like  it, 
without  regard  to  whether  or  not  it  may  be  con- 
sidered socialistic,  capitalistic,  idealistic,  material- 
istic, or  atavistic.  The  attitude  of  "show  me," 
assumed  traditionally  by  Missourians,  is  really 
characteristic  of  Anglo-Saxon  civilization. 

The  grievance  that  the  Socialistic  cure-all  is 
designed  to  correct  is,  as  I  conceive  it,  the  fact  that 
the  rewards  of  effort  are  unjustly  distributed.  When 
we  come  to  define  equitable  distribution,  then  we  all 
part  company;  but  most  of  us  agree  that  the  present 
arrangement  is  inequitable.    Some  would  assert  that 


Socialism  6 1 

any  possible  arrangement  is  inequitable,  while  others 
would  say  that  an  equitable  distribution  is  within 
the  bounds  of  possibility.  The  Socialists  go  fur- 
ther: they  say  that  they  can  define  equitable  distri- 
bution (though  they  do  not  all  do  it  in  the  same 
way)  and  that  they  have  discovered  a  sure  means  of 
bringing  it  about.  The  western  attitude  is  some- 
thing like  this:  those  who  hold  it  recognize  the 
injustice  of  the  present  state  of  things  and  sympa- 
thize with  efforts  to  make  it  better;  but  they  regard 
it  as  a  group  of  phenomena  each  of  which  must  be 
dealt  with  separately  and  experimentally.  Anything 
that  seems  likely  to  work  in  the  direction  of  partial 
and  local  alleviation  is  willingly  tried.  Hence  we 
have  commission  forms  of  government,  the  eccen- 
tricities of  the  Oklahoma  constitution,  bank-deposit 
guarantees,  hotel  inspection,  the  initiative,  referen- 
dum, and  recall,  woman  suffrage  in  several  states, 
drastic  railway  regulation,  and  many  other  such 
expedients. 

In  The  Land  of  the  Dollar,  a  book  which, 
belying  its  somewhat  flippant  title,  is  one  of  the 
most  appreciative  short  estimates  of  our  country, 
the  author,  the  late  G.  W.  Steevens,  writing  during 
the  McKinley-Bryan  campaign  of  1896,  speaks  as 
follows : 

For  the  first  time,  the  East  and  West  find,  or  believe 
they  find,  their  interests  sharply  and  diametrically  op- 


62  The  Different  West 

posed.  And  I  own  it  does  not  appear  to  me  the  best  of 
augury  for  the  ultimate  unity  of  this  country  that  each 
side  appears  more  set  on  beating  down  the  opponent  than 
on  trying  to  conciliate  his  interests  with  his  own.  I  have 
not  noticed,  for  instance,  that  the  Republicans  have  put 
out  any  alternative  policy  to  relieve  western  agriculture, 
nor  that  the  Democrats  have  devised  any  expedient,  in 
the  event  of  their  success,  to  break  the  fall  of  eastern 
business. 

The  election  was  won  by  the  Republicans.  What 
would  have  happened  if  the  other  side  had  been 
victorious,  we  need  not  discuss.  But  western  agri- 
culture is  not  only  "  relieved  "  but  is  extraordinarily 
prosperous  and  as  satisfied  as  any  restless  American 
industry  can  be.  Some  will  say  that  this  is  because 
"  Providence  looks  out  for  children,  drunken  men, 
and  the  United  States;"  but  another  adage  tells  us 
"  God  helps  those  who  help  themselves,"  and  I  pre- 
fer to  think  that  we  fall  into  the  latter  category 
rather  than  into  the  "shorn-lamb"  class  to  whom 
the  wind  is  tempered.  Napoleon  Is  said  to  have 
asked  first  about  every  man  to  whom  his  attention 
was  called,  "Is  he  lucky?"  He  was  quite  right. 
A  man's  "luck"  is  usually  the  excuse  given  by  his 
incompetent  friends  for  some  special  ability  and  Its 
satisfactory  results.  The  western  farmer  has  doubt- 
less been  fortunate,  but  I  can  not  help  thinking  that 
he  himself  has  had  something  to  do  with  it.  And  it 
is  quite  possible  that  after  the  contest  the  victors 


Western  Luck  63, 


themselves  turned  their  attention  to  that  conciliation 
of  interests,  of  whose  absence  during  the  campaign 
Mr.  Steevens  complains.  This  is  quite  in  accord  with 
the  customs  of  all  good  fighters.  When  the  fight  is 
on,  they  fight;  the  time  for  conciliation  does  not 
arrive  until  the  issue  has  been  decided. 

This  chapter  began  with  an  allusion  to  some  early 
western  political  unrest  that  bore  fruit  in  armed 
protest.  "The  voice  of  the  West,"  said  Woodrow 
Wilson  on  a  western  trip  in  191 1,  "is  a  voice  of 
protest."  In  the  Kansas-Missouri  border  warfare 
just  preceding  the  civil  war,  the  irrepressible  conflict 
between  North  and  South  broke  out  in  a  character- 
istic western  way.  The  influence  of  such  lawlessness 
as  this  is  hard  to  eradicate.  It  showed  itself  in  the 
career  of  the  James  brothers  and  of  others  in  more 
recent  times.  In  certain  regions  of  the  West  as 
nowhere  in  the  East,  there  are  persons  with  the 
true  brigand  spirit  of  Italy  and  Corsica.  The  train 
robber,  to  them,  is  one  of  their  own  people, 
misguided  perhaps,  but  to  be  sympathized  with, 
concealed,  and  even  admired.  This  spirit  is  dis- 
appearing, but  it  still  exists.  "They  value  good 
government,"  says  our  kindly  critic,  Mr.  Bryce, 
"but  they  are  tolerant  of  lawlessness  that  does  not 
directly  attack  their  own  interest." 

Most  western  lawlessness  is  a  survival,  and  it 
survives  not  so  much  from  tolerance  of  the  kind 


64  The  Different  West 

mentioned  by  Mr.  Bryce  as  because  the  western 
states  do  not  possess  the  machinery  for  its  suppres- 
sion. That  machinery  is  not  created  because,  after 
all,  the  lawlessness  is  sporadic  and  it  does  not  seem 
worth  while  to  mount  a  siege-gun  to  kill  a  grass- 
hopper. This  may  not  be  the  right  way  to  look 
at  the  matter.  A  little  abnormal  lawbreaking, 
especially  if  it  tends  toward  brigandage,  will  give 
a  black  eye  to  a  community  that  is  normally  quiet 
and  peaceful.  A  train  robbery  here,  a  mountain 
feud  there,  will  create  the  impression  of  utter  dis- 
regard for  order,  whereas  there  may  be  more  actual 
crime  in  proportion  to  population  in  a  week  of 
New  York  than  in  a  year  of  such  a  region.  Take, 
if  you  please,  train  robbery  —  a  crime  more  fre- 
quent in  the  West  than  in  the  East,  partly  because 
of  the  facilities,  for  both  commission  and  escape, 
offered  by  more  sparsely  settled  country  and  partly 
as  an  inheritance  from  former  frontier  or  border 
lawlessness.  To  do  away  with  highway  robbery 
of  any  kind,  of  which  train  robbery  is  but  a  species, 
a  local  police  or  constabulary  is  totally  insufficient. 
An  organization  covering  a  wide  extent  of  terri- 
tory—  a  state  or  national  police  like  the  Cuban 
Rurales,  the  Texas  Rangers,  or  the  Pennsylvania 
Constabulary  is  needed.  But  shall  such  an  organi- 
zation be  created  to  stop  an  occasional  train 
robbery?     The  western  states  have  evidently  de- 


Lawlessness  65 


cided  that  it  would  be  a  waste  of  money  to  do  so. 
Texas  had  her  border  conditions  to  care  for :  Penn- 
sylvania her  mining  territory;  a  state  police  has 
paid  them  where  it  might  not  pay  Iowa  or  Mis- 
souri or  Kansas.  This  may  be  bad  argument,  but 
it  is  the  argument  that  makes  conditions  what  they 
are,  whether  it  has  been  definitely  formulated  or 
not.  Fortunately,  whenever  a  train  robber  inter- 
feres with  the  mails,  the  Federal  secret  service  at 
once  takes  the  matter  up  and,  not  being  hampered 
by  local  conditions,  generally  runs  the  culprits  to 
earth.  And  if  it  comes  to  capture,  the  robber  pre- 
fers Federal  custody,  for  in  some  western  states 
death  is  the  penalty  for  his  crime,  whereas  Federal 
law  prescribes  only  imprisonment.  It  is  a  curious 
commentary  on  the  feebleness  of  local  authority,  in 
the  face  of  this  type  of  offense,  that  the  train  robber 
has  vastly  more  fear  of  the  Federal  detective,  with 
imprisonment  as  his  only  weapon,  than  of  the  local 
police,  capture  by  whom  means  the  gallows. 

Lawlessness  such  as  this,  however,  is  rather  a 
relic  of  past  political  unrest  than  an  indication  of 
the  present  variety,  which  has  nothing  in  common 
with  it.  The  politics  of  the  West  will  continue 
strenuous  so  long  as  its  temper  is  unchanged,  but 
we  shall  have  no  more  whisky  insurrections,  no 
more  border  warfare,  and,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  no  more 
bandit  "brothers"  of  the  James  and  Younger  type. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE   west's  .  ECONOMIC    UNREST 

THAT  the  speculative  element  can  never  be 
eliminated  from  commercial  transactions  goes 
without  saying.  It  is  present  even  in  so  elementary 
a  case  as  the  purchase  of  food  for  one's  own  use, 
without  thought  of  selling:  for  whether  one  spends 
much  or  little  for  a  given  amount  depends  on  the 
state  of  the  market.  The  prudent  man  will  lay  in 
an  extra  stock  of  non-perishable  goods  when  prices 
are  low  —  that  is,  when  they  are  as  low  as  he  thinks 
they  are  likely  to  go.  Whether  he  is  right  or  not 
depends  partly  on  his  judgment,  partly  on  chance. 
There  will  be  many  who  are  not  prudent  enough  to 
do  this,  or  who  do  not  trust  their  own  judgments 
sufficiently  to  attempt  it.  It  would  seem  eminently 
proper  that  others  who  are  prudent  and  who  do 
trust  their  own  judgment  should  be  able,  by  buying 
and  reselling  to  the  ignorant  or  timid  ones,  to  make 
the  profits  that  these  either  do  not  know  how  to 
make,  or  are  afraid  to  make,  for  themselves.  From 
such  operations  as  these  we  may  advance  by  almost 
imperceptible  steps  to  the  worst  forms  of  wild-cat 
speculation,  which  few  would  hesitate  to  call  gam- 

66 


Wall  Street  67 


bling,  pure  and  simple.  The  line  must  be  drawn 
somewhere,  and  the  place  for  drawing  it  must  be 
selected  more  or  less  arbitrarily. 

This  selection  involves  the  personal  equation. 
The  Wall  Street  man,  who  lives  in  an  atmosphere 
of  speculation,  will  not  draw  it  in  the  same  place 
as  the  Missouri  farmer,  in  whose  commercial  trans- 
actions chance  plays  a  relatively  unimportant  part. 
A  creditor  and  a  debtor  would  not  be  likely  to  agree 
on  the  place  to  draw  it;  still  less  the  members  of  a 
creditor  class  and  a  debtor  class.  Now,  until  very 
recently  the  western  farmer  was  always  a  borrower. 
His  property  was  mortgaged  and  he  was  continually 
paying  interest  to  eastern  capitalists.  It  seemed  to 
him,  rightly  or  wrongly,  that  conditions  were  so 
manipulated  and  rates  of  interest  so  adjusted,  in 
eastern  financial  circles,  as  to  keep  him  always  a 
debtor  and  to  make  him  pay  high  for  the  privi- 
lege. Matters  have  changed  now:  the  Kansas  and 
Nebraska  farmers  have  paid  off  their  mortgages, 
have  money  in  the  bank,  and  own  automobiles;  but 
hard  feelings  engendered  by  conditions  do  not 
always  disappear  with  the  alteration  of  those 
conditions. 

Some  of  us  still  lay  up  against  our  English  cousins 
the  fact  that  they  objected,  with  force  of  arms,  to 
our  independence,  despite  the  fact  that  we  have  now 
possessed  and  enjoyed  it  for  nearly  a  century  and  a 


68  The  Different  West 

half.  It  is  possible  that  the  western  farmers'  feel- 
ing against  "Wall  Street"  will  last  as  long  as  this, 
and  if  conditions  should  ever  become  unfavorable 
again,  that  feeling  will  be  intensified.  At  present 
it  is  also  kept  alive  by  the  tariff.  Despite  efforts 
to  persuade  the  farmer  to  be  a  high-tariff  man, 
increased  protective  duties  on  imports  have  been 
generally  due  to  the  efforts  of  manufacturers.  The 
East  has  been  more  thoroughly  and  consistently 
protectionist  than  the  West,  and  the  western  farmer 
has  been  a  low-tariff  man  on  economic  grounds, 
whatever  his  political  affiliations. 

Of  course,  the  "Wall  Street"  that  is  detested 
and  feared  in  the  West  is  the  whole  body  of  eastern 
financial  and  industrial  influence  —  the  influence  of 
the  money-lender,  the  high-tariff  manufacturer,  the 
manipulator  of  markets,  the  maker  and  controller 
of  trusts.  All  of  these  occupations,  it  is  true,  are 
now  indulged  in  by  westerners  also.  More  shoes 
are  made  in  St.  Louis  than  in  Boston ;  the  "  corners  " 
of  the  Chicago  exchanges  rival  those  of  New  York; 
the  trust  extends  its  wings  over  the  West  as  well 
as  the  East.  But  as  in  the  case  of  other  grievances, 
the  feeling  lasts  longer  than  the  conditions  that  give 
rise  to  it,  and  the  western  feeling  against  "Wall 
Street"  is  very  real  and  very  important.  Griev- 
ances of  this  kind,  real  or  fancied,  become,  after 


Freak  Laws  69 

long  nursing,  the  causes  of  great  political  or 
economic  upheavals  that  are  precipitated  by  some 
apparently  trivial  incident.  It  was  not  the  greasing 
of  the  cartridges  that  made  India  flame  out  into 
mutiny,  or  the  passage  of  the  Stamp  Act  that  severed 
our  bonds  with  the  Mother  Country,  or  the  elec- 
tion of  Lincoln  that  brought  about  secession.  These 
events  were  due  to  long-continued  tension  that  was 
bound  to  find  relief  in  one  way  if  it  did  not  in  an- 
other. Possibly  the  tension  in  the  West  may  never 
result  in  any  great  upheaval,  but  it  has  had  impor- 
tant political  results  in  the  past  and  may  conceivably 
have  others  in  the  future,  before  it  is  relieved.  Some 
of  these  results  are  Populism,  the  Free  Silver  move- 
ment, "  Insurgency,"  and  others  dwelt  upon  with 
more  detail  in  the  last  chapter.  Be  this  as  it  may, 
it  is  certain  that  the  East  greatly  underrates  this 
tension,  largely  because  of  its  inability  to  under- 
stand it. 

One  cause  of  this  inability  is  the  fact  that  in  the 
East  there  are  fewer  points  for  a  movement  to 
crystallize  upon  than  in  the  West.  Chemists  know 
that  a  solution  may  remain  supersaturated  for  an 
indefinite  time,  until  a  tiny  crystal  is  dropped  in, 
when  solidification,  proceeding  from  that  crystal  as 
a  nucleus,  begins  at  once.  The  East  may  be  super- 
saturated with  feeling — jealousy,  or  fear,  or  indig- 


70  The  D liferent  West 

nation,  but  there  are  no  nuclei  to  start  that  feeling 

into  activity.     These  nuclei  are  furnished,  in  the 

West,  by  the  tendency  to  try  experiments. 

G.  W.  Steevens  says: 

Kansas  has  been  the  drunken  helot  of  American  poli- 
tics. "  Here  's  a  law ;  let 's  enact  it,"  has  been  its  continual 
watchword.  ...  In  the  last  few  years  [prior  to  1896] 
it  has  given  its  allegiance  to  four  new  political  parties. 
These  were  the  Farmers'  Alliance,  the  National  Alliance, 
the  People's  Party,  and  the  Silver  Party.  None  of  them 
did  any  good. 

All  this  puts  In  somewhat  exaggerated  and  strik- 
ing phraseology  the  restless,  experimental  temper 
that  is  doubtless  characteristic  of  Kansas,  but  no 
more  of  her  than  of  her  neighbor  states.  This 
tendency,  which  is  peculiarly  an  American  trait, 
appears  in  the  adoption  of  woman  suffrage  in  a 
few  western  States,  the  success  of  prohibition  In 
others,  such  "freak."  constitutions  as  that  of  Okla- 
homa, and  more  recently  in  the  Socialist  victory  in 
Milwaukee.  No  one  in  the  West  believes  that  a 
majority  of  the  Milwaukeeans  suddenly  became  at 
this  time  disciples  of  Lassalle  or  Karl  Marx.  They 
had  tried  both  the  old  parties,  with  unsatisfactory 
results,  and  began  experimenting  on  the  third  — 
that  Is  all.  This  entry  of  Socialism  Into  the  domain 
of  practical  politics  is  looked  upon  in  the  West  as 
rather  a  good  thing  than  otherwise.  The  abolition- 
ism of  Lincoln  was  a  different  thing  from  that  of 


The  Western  Judiciary  Jl, 

Garrison;  the  prohibition  spirit  of  Georgia  is  not 
that  of  Neal  Dow.  Nor  Is  the  soclahsm  of  Victor 
Berger  that  of  the  preachers  of  a  somewhat  abstract 
social  revolution. 

The  westerners,  as  has  already  been  said,  like 
abstract  principles;  they  enjoy  tackling  separate 
problems  in  their  own  way,  and  will  go  far  and  act 
rashly  In  experimenting  on  solutions;  but  they  object 
to  set  programs.  This  temper  results,  like  all  experi- 
mentation, in  failures  and  even  In  disasters;  but  it 
also  results  In  the  acquisition  of  knowledge  that  can 
be  obtained  in  no  other  way  —  In  ascertaining,  for 
instance,  those  localities  where  prohibition  will  work, 
the  cities  that  can  be  governed  on  the  commission 
plan,  the  possibilities  of  such  schemes  as  the  bank- 
deposit  guarantee  of  Oklahoma,  the  mild  character 
of  an  avowedly  Socialistic  municipal  government. 

Now,  under  these  circumstances,  when  the  mind 
of  a  community  Is  under  tension,  successful  experi- 
ments of  this  kind  serve  as  lines  of  least  resistance, 
along  which  relief  may  be  afforded;  or,  to  use  our 
recent  simile,  as  nuclei  upon  which  crystallization 
may  relieve  supersaturation.  One  of  the  most  In- 
teresting points  to  consider  in  this  connection  is  the 
composition  of  the  western  judiciary  and  the  atti- 
tude of  the  western  people  toward  It.  The  judiciary 
is  much  nearer  the  people  in  the  West  than  in  the 
East.    Its  character  is  not,  on  the  whole,  as  high, 


72  The  Different  West 

but  it  is  regarded  with  more  friendliness,  if  with 
not  so  much  awe.  It  is  uniformly  elective,  and 
there  has  been  much  rotation  in  office,  so  that  almost 
every  passable  lawyer  in  the  community  has  sat  on 
the  bench  at  one  time  or  another,  and  judges  are 
as  numerous  as  colonels  in  Kentucky.  This  has  its 
disadvantages,  but  in  certain  conditions  it  is  an 
advantage.  It  is  as  fortunate  a  thing  for  a  judge 
to  have  the  community  on  his  side  as  it  is  for  a 
governor  or  a  mayor.  This  viewpoint  will  not 
appeal  to  those  who  regard  a  judge  as  a  stern  re- 
pressor of  a  wicked  and  untoward  generation  rather 
than  as  the  living  voice  of  the  community's  subli- 
mated common  sense. 

This  idea  seems  to  be  that  the  law  is  a  definite 
thing  and  that  the  task  of  finding  out  what  it  is  is 
like  a  mathematical  problem.  Obviously,  if  this 
is  correct,  the  personal  or  political  bias  of  the  judge, 
his  birth,  breeding,  education,  affiliations,  and  modes 
of  thought  have  absolutely  nothing  to  do  with  his 
decisions.  He  ascertains  what  the  law  is  and  makes 
declaration  thereof  —  that  is  all.  The  trouble  is 
that  the  personal  equation  so  obviously  does  enter 
into  it  all  that  he  who  runs  may  read.  Two  mathe- 
maticians may,  in  solving  an  intricate  problem,  arrive 
at  different  results,  but  it  is  always  possible  to  find 
out  which  is  right  and  to  demonstrate  it  to  the  other 
in  such  a  way  as  to  force  his  acknowledgment.    No 


Eastern  and  Western  Radicalism         73 

such  thing  has  ever  been  possible  in  law.  Doubtless 
the  law  is  definite  within  certain  limits,  but  those 
limits  allow  for  plenty  of  "lost  motion,"  and  this 
is  where  personal,  political,  or  sectional  bias  comes 
unconsciously  into  play.  Theodore  Roosevelt  has 
always  seen  this,  and  his  keen  perception  of  it  has 
led  to  his  so-called  "  attacks  on  the  judiciary."  The 
Arizonans  saw  it  when  in  their  new  constitution 
they  extended  the  principle  of  the  recall  to  their 
judges.  It  is  hopeless  to  expect  that  the  judiciary 
of  a  whole  section  can  remain  free  from  influences 
that  pervade  it,  and  I  believe  that  western  judicial 
decisions  reflect  in  many  cases  the  restless  temper, 
the  tension,  the  supersaturation  that  has  been  de- 
scribed. The  most  radical  decisions  under  the 
Sherman  law,  the  pure  food  law,  railway  legisla- 
tion, etc.,  have  been  in  the  West.  This  does  not 
mean  that  the  West  is  dissatisfied  with  the  judiciary 
or  with  the  place  it  has  come  to  occupy  in  our  system 
of  government.  It  reserves  the  right  to  criticize  or 
condemn  a  judicial  act  as  it  does  an  executive  or  a 
legislative  act.  It  may  make  up  its  mind  that  a 
given  judge  is  incompetent  and  should  be  replaced. 
It  may  even  be  in  favor  of  applying  the  "  recall " 
to  the  judiciary  —  a  perfectly  logical  position  in 
cases  where  the  judiciary  is  elective  —  but  it  has 
no  intention  to  belittle  the  functions  or  dignity  of  a 
judge. 


74  The  Different  West 

In  an  address  before  a  western  club,  an  eastern 
radical  recently  made  an  attack  on  the  judiciary  — 
on  the  whole  position  that  it  has  come  to  occupy  in 
our  system  —  that,  under  the  guise  of  logic  and 
fair-mindedness,  was  little  short  of  revolutionary. 
To  judge  by  the  way  in  which  it  was  received,  the 
West  does  not  sympathize  with  this  sort  of  thing. 
The  matter  may  be  worth  a  few  words,  as  it  illus- 
trates the  difference  between  the  individualistic, 
almost  anarchistic,  radicahsm  of  the  East  and  the 
collectivist,  social,  or  civic  radicalism  of  the  West. 
The  speaker's  attack  on  the  courts  was  in  the  guise 
of  a  protest  against  undue  veneration  of  the  United 
States  Supreme  Court,  but  was  in  fact  an  assertion 
that  no  one  but  the  disputants  in  a  suit  should  pay 
any  attention  to  the  decision  of  a  court  in  that  suit. 
The  Supreme  Court  has  no  prerogatives  not  pos- 
sessed by  other  courts,  except  that  it  is  higher  than 
they.  They  must  all  decide  questions  in  accordance 
with  the  law,  and  in  so  doing  it  frequently  becomes 
necessary  for  them  to  decide  what  the  law  means  or 
whether  the  law-making  body,  when  its  jurisdiction 
is  limited  as  is  that  of  Congress,  went  beyond  its 
powers  in  some  instance,  making  its  acts  of  no  effect. 

Now,  after  such  a  decision  it  is,  of  course,  theo- 
retically possible  for  another  suit,  involving  pre- 
cisely the  same  questions  to  be  brought,  and 
another    and    another,    each    of   which    would   be 


Eastern  and  Western  Radicalism         75 

decided  in  the  same  way.  It  is  much  easier  and 
less  expensive,  however,  to  recognize  this  fact  and 
shape  our  conduct  according  to  the  first  decision, 
just  as  it  is  wiser  for  a  goat  who  butts  his  head 
against  a  wall  to  stop  right  there  and  not  repeat 
the  act  indefinitely.  Such  acceptance  of  the  situa- 
tion is  a  civic  act.  It  is  better  for  the  community, 
though  it  may  not  suit  the  individual,  who  may 
prefer  to  have  his  own  turn  at  the  game  of  litigation. 
This  latter  method  is  quite  familiar  in  the  criminal 
law.  Jones  steals  money  and  goes  to  jail;  and, 
Smith,  Brown,  and  Robinson,  in  turn,  do  precisely 
the  same  thing  and  are  served  in  precisely  the  same 
way.  This  is  surely  anti-civic,  and  to  extend  the 
custom  to  civil  procedure  would  seem  to  a  layman 
no  less  so. 

But  this  is  not  the  worst  of  it.  The  speaker 
would  have  had  the  Executive  of  the  United  States, 
after  the  Supreme  Court,  in  the  course  of  htigation, 
had  decided  that  Congress  went  beyond  its  powers 
in  passing  an  income-tax  law,  and  that  therefore 
such  law  was  void,  continue  to  collect  the  tax,  letting 
individuals  continue,  as  they  desired,  to  bring  the 
matter  into  litigation,  but  disregarding  every  deci- 
sion as  applicable  only  to  the  case  in  hand.  This 
is  so  thorough  a  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  the  whole 
contention  that  it  is  probably  unnecessary  to  pursue 
it  further.    So  extended  reference  to  it  is  excusable 


76  The  Different  West 

only  because  it  may  serve  to  show  what  I  believe 
is  a  fundamental  difference  between  the  radicalism 
of  the  East  and  that  of  the  West.  The  former  is 
that  of  individuals  and  is  hence  individualistic;  the 
latter  is  that  of  coherent  bodies  of  men  or  of 
communities,  and  hence  is  social. 

Of  course,  this  kind  of  an  attack  on  the  judiciary 
is  a  totally  different  thing  from  that  attributed  to 
Mr.  Roosevelt.  The  prerogative  of  criticizing 
judges,  or  mayors,  or  selectmen,  is  freely  exercised 
by  all,  from  ex-presidents  down  to  the  solons  of 
the  corner  grocery,  and  will  probably  be  exercised 
by  all  so  long  as  "  Freedom  from  her  mountain 
height"  continues  to  watch  over  our  liberties. 

Much  economic  unrest  at  present  is  very  inti- 
mately bound  up  with  the  transportation  problem. 
The  general  feeling  that  the  railroads  are  not  deal- 
ing fairly  with  the  public  is  shared  with  the  rest  of 
the  country,  but  somewhat  intensified  by  local  condi- 
tions and  by  the  general  attitude  of  protest  so  com- 
mon in  the  West.  It  has  come  to  the  surface 
especially  in  efforts  at  rate  regulation,  which  the 
railroads  resent  as  ill-considered,  and  which  are 
perhaps  not  well-considered,  or  indeed  considered  at 
all,  being  merely  somewhat  blind  attempts  to  "  get 
back"  at  the  roads.  The  roads  are  at  last  begin- 
ing  to  realize  that  they  are  unpopular,  though  they 
profess  not  to  understand  why.    I  heard  a  railroad 


Feeling  Against  the  Railroads  77 

official  say  recently  that  a  great  strike  of  railroad 
employees  is  inevitable.  The  demands  and  beha- 
vior of  the  men  are  becoming  unbearable,  he  said. 
The  railroads  meekly  yield  to  the  one  and  suffer 
the  other  because  they  know  that  in  any  contest  the 
public  would  be  against  them.  "The  strike  will 
come  whenever  we  are  ready  to  make  a  stand," 
said  he.  "And  when  we  get  the  public  to  looking 
at  matters  from  our  standpoint,  just  see  how  quickly 
we  shall  bring  it  on ! "  An  unconscious  tribute  to 
public  opinion  and  a  recognition  of  how  that  opinion 
regards  the  roads.  As  a  relief  from  their  exactions, 
some  are  looking  forward  with  hopefulness  to  the 
resumption  of  river  transportation.  The  only  way, 
however,  in  which  the  railroads  have  killed  river 
transportation  is  by  furnishing  something  better,  as 
noted  in  another  chapter.  Hope  for  still  better 
conditions  is  justifiable,  but  longing  for  the  old  river 
days  is  foolish.  Those  who  wish  to  ship  goods  by 
boat  may  still  do  so;  the  charges  are  less  than  by 
rail,  but  the  insurance  brings  them  up  in  excess  of 
the  railway  rates.  This  simply  means  that  shippers 
are  not  content  to  send  their  goods  in  the  kind  of 
boats  and  under  the  conditions  of  loading,  trans- 
portation, landing,  and  temporary  storage  on  shore 
that  obtained  in  the  old  days.  Betterment  of  these 
conditions  will  result  in  lowering  the  insurance  rates 
and  making  the  cost  of  river  transportation  really 


78  The  Different  West 

lower  than  that  by  railway.  With  all  this  the  rail- 
road has  had  little  to  do  except  to  create  a  higher 
standard  of  speed  and  safety  for  freight.  So  far 
as  the  rate  question  is  concerned,  the  shippers'  side 
of  it  is  given  very  forcibly  in  Norris's  novel,  The 
Octopus.  All  that  the  railroad  can  say,  on  the  other 
side,  is  that  it  wants  only  a  fair  return  on  its  capital. 
What  this  return  ought  to  be,  however,  is  something 
that  no  two  persons  will  figure  out  in  the  same  way, 
since  no  two  can  agree  on  what  it  ought  to  be  based. 
The  public  demand  for  a  physical  valuation  of 
these  and  other  public  service  properties  is  very 
loud  and  insistent  in  the  West;  and  it  is  doubtless 
a  proper  and  inevitable  step  as  a  necessary  factor 
in  the  determination  of  equitable  rates,  whether  or 
not  these  are  to  be  based  directly  upon  it  or  no. 

It  should  be  noted  that  absentee  landlordship 
plays  an  important  part  in  western  feeling  toward 
western  railroads.  The  roads  are  now  largely  con- 
trolled by  easterners,  and  the  public  can  scarcely  be 
expected  to  look  upon  the  property  of  Gould  or 
Harriman  as  it  might  on  something  owned  and 
operated  by  its  friends  and  neighbors.  When  any- 
thing is  done  to  hurt  the  railroads,  they  cry  out 
against  the  injustice  done  to  the  "widows  and  or- 
phans" who  own  them.  When  those  widows  and 
orphans  also  control  them,  doubtless  we  shall  see 
the  West  exercising  more  chivalry  in  its  acts  toward 


Absentee  Railway  Owners  79 

the  roads;  but  at  present  they  seem  as  mythical  as 
their  real  owners  are  distant.  Of  the  physical  con- 
dition of  the  roads  and  the  way  in  which  they  are 
run,  something  is  said  In  another  chapter. 


CHAPTER   VII 

EDUCATION    IN    THE    WEST 

liyTR.  BRYCE,  in  his  just  and  sympathetic 
-*'^-^  account  of  the  United  States,  comments  on 
the  fact  that  our  educational  institutions,  of  which 
we  speak  more  modestly  and  with  greater  hesita- 
tion than  about  any  other  feature  of  our  national 
existence,  are  the  very  thing  that  most  commands 
the  admiration  of  the  outsider  and  inspires  him 
with  the  greatest  confidence  in  our  future. 

These  institutions,  both  lower  and  higher,  have 
changed  even  since  Mr.  Bryce  wrote  his  book;  they 
have  been  developing  and,  on  the  whole,  improving, 
even  in  the  East;  but  in  the  West  the  changes  have 
been  in  some  respects  rapid  and  radical. 

The  increased  respect  shown  for  the  public  school 
by  well-to-do  people  —  what  may  be  called  a  rise 
in  its  social  status  —  has  been  notable  in  both  sec- 
tions, but  especially  in  the  West.  I  well  remember 
New  England  towns  of  my  boyhood  where,  in  spite 
of  much  alleged  pride  in  the  *'  district  school " 
system  and  much  talk  of  its  being  the  bulwark  of 
our  liberties,  no  well-to-do  person  would  have 
thought  for  an  instant  of  sending  his  children  to 

80 


Public  Education  8 1 

a  public  school.  Today,  in  those  same  towns  there 
are  good  graded  schools  to  which  all  elements  of 
the  community  send  pupils  —  an  advance  in  democ- 
racy when  it  would  least  be  expected.  But  in  the 
West,  instruction  through  public  channels  has  always 
been  respected.  There  as  elsewhere,  private  schools 
will  always  be  preferred  by  certain  persons,  but  this 
preference  is  not  widespread.  This  may  be  a  reflec- 
tion of  the  excellence  of  public  school  instruction, 
but  in  part,  also,  it  is  a  cause  of  that  excellence, 
and  due  to  the  general  temper  of  the  people.  In 
general,  the  grade  of  teachers  is  apt  to  be  better 
and  the  character  of  the  buildings  higher  than  in 
eastern  communities  of  the  same  grade.  Where  the 
community  is  poor  or  ignorant,  the  schools  will  be 
bad,  of  course  —  East  or  West. 

In  the  extension  of  school  activity  in  the  direc- 
tion of  facilities  for  recreation,  the  West  is  far 
ahead  of  the  East.  Nothing  like  the  Chicago  play- 
grounds, with  their  complete  and  sensible  "field- 
houses,"  may  be  seen  anywhere  else  in  the  world. 

It  seems  to  have  been  assumed  in  the  East  that 
any  sort  of  a  public  building  in  a  park  must  be 
ornate  and  useless  —  a  combination  of  a  band-stand, 
used  one  evening  a  week,  with  a  pavilion,  used  by 
nobody  at  all,  if  he  can  help  it.  Probably  the  money 
spent  on  such  structures  in  the  New  York  play- 
grounds would  have  built  field-houses  like  those  in 


82  The  Different  West 

Chicago  —  permanent  contributions  to  the  health 
and  enjoyment  of  the  neighborhood;  agencies  for 
physical  and  moral  improvement  that  can  scarcely 
be  overestimated.  Each  of  these  field-houses  con- 
tains a  large  assembly-hall,  whose  use  is  given  freely 
for  private  social  gatherings;  a  gymnasium  for  men 
and  one  for  women,  with  skilled  attendants;  a 
branch  of  the  public  library,  and  a  capacious  out- 
door swimming  pool.  The  buildings  have  the 
beauty  that  comes  from  perfect  adaptation  to  use 
with  no  attempt  at  useless  ornament.  If  the  West 
had  produced  no  educational  innovation  but  these 
field-houses,  it  would  have  deserved  our  admiration. 
Public  education  has  been  carried  higher  up  in  the 
West  than  in  the  East.  Universities  supported  by 
public  taxation  are  the  rule  there  instead  of  the 
exception.  Great  private  foundations  there  are, 
but  except  in  the  case  of  the  University  of  Chicago 
they  are  not  relatively  as  important  as  those  of  the 
East.  And  most  of  these  endowed  institutions  are 
situated  in  cities  of  considerable  size  and  draw  their 
students  largely  from  the  adjoining  population,  to 
whom  the  privilege  of  living  at  home,  with  its  conse- 
quent saving,  appeals  more  than  the  saving  of 
tuition  effected  by  enrollment  in  the  state  university. 
The  difference  between  a  state-supported  university 
and  institutions  like  Yale,  Harvard,  or  Princeton 
may  be  summarized  by  saying  that  they  are  similar 


Democracy  83 

to  the  differences  between  a  public  high  school  and 
preparatory  schools  like  Andover,  Exeter,  St.  Paul's, 
and  Groton.  They  depend  largely  on  the  fact  that 
the  student  at  Yale  or  Harvard,  like  the  boy  at  St. 
Paul's  or  Groton,  regards  himself  as  the  privileged 
member  of  an  organization  having  forms,  customs, 
and  traditions,  and  not  simply  as  benefiting  by  cer- 
tain courses  of  instruction  provided  equally  for  all 
by  public  taxation. 

It  may  be  objected  that  this  is  not  democratic; 
doubtless  it  is  not.  It  is  a  popular  fiction  that 
democracy  is  particularly  in  favor  in  the  United 
States.  Democrats  we  are,  doubtless,  not  from 
abstract  love  of  it  or  reasoned  acceptance  of  it, 
but,  perforce,  from  the  growth  of  conditions.  Pro- 
fessor WiUiam  G.  Sumner  used  to  say  that  the 
peerage  was  not  introduced  into  this  country  when 
it  was  settled  because  economic  conditions  required 
that  everyone  should  do  personal  work  on  the  land ; 
and  a  peer  at  the  plough  would  be  absurd.  It  is 
for  reasons  such  as  this  that  we  have  democratic 
manners  and  customs.  There  is  plenty  of  democ- 
racy left  at  the  older  universities,  and  it  is  probable 
that  the  public  institutions  will  become  assimilated 
to  them  by  the  gradual  acquisition  of  their  own 
forms  and  traditions  rather  than  by  the  loss  of  such 
by  the  institutions  that  now  possess  them.  Indeed, 
the   acquisition  of  ritual  and  ceremony  has  been 


84  The  Different  West 

rather  noticeable  in  the  United  States  all  along  the 
line  in  the  past  twenty  years. 

At  a  Yale  commencement  a  score  of  years  ago 
the  only  traces  of  formalism  were  the  procession 
across  the  Green  to  the  old  Center  Church,  headed 
by  the  sheriff  of  New  Haven  County,  and  the  presi- 
dent's use  of  Latin  as  he  bestowed  degrees  or  called 
upon  the  band  to  play.  Now  the  graduating  classes 
are  in  cap  and  gown,  and  the  dignitaries  on  the 
stage  glow  in  the  rainbow  hues  of  appropriate  robes 
and  hoods.  The  president  enters  the  university  hall 
where  the  ceremonies  take  place,  preceded  by  an 
official  bearing  a  mace  of  gold,  and  he  wears  a 
heavy  gold  chain  of  office  about  his  neck.  Doubt- 
less the  fact  that  the  university  already  had  certain 
forms  and  ceremonies  made  it  easier  to  adopt  these 
newer  symbols  and  functions,  and  the  briefness  of  a 
college  generation  —  only  four  years  —  soon  incor- 
porated them  all  into  the  local  undergraduate  body 
of  tradition. 

This  ritualizing  influence,  which  has  been  felt 
widely  outside  of  educational  institutions,  clothing 
railroad  conductors  in  uniforms  and  bedecking  erst- 
while sober  churches  with  altar  candles,  will  in  time 
extend  to  our  public  schools  and  our  state  universi- 
ties. Even  now  there  are  signs  of  traditions  in  both. 
Public  School  No.  36,  for  example,  is  affectionately 
spoken  of  by  its  graduates  as  "  Dear  Old  Thirty- 


Growth  of  Ritualism  85 

six."  Tales  of  its  early  days  accumulate  and  grow; 
its  pupils  are  proud  of  its  achievements  in  athletics 
or  in  scholarship,  even  as  an  Eton  boy  might  be. 
It  is  slowly  coming  to  have  the  same  kind  of  tradi- 
tions as  Andover  or  Lawrenceville,  albeit  hampered 
by  democracy.  And  this  will  come  to  the  state 
universities  also,  perhaps  with  some  grateful 
modifications. 

A  recent  investigator  of  university  conditions,  in 
illustrating  the  reign  of  blind  tradition  at  eastern 
universities,  has  told  how,  when  he  asked  for  the 
reason  of  this  or  that  oddity,  he  was  answered 
calmly,  "We  have  always  done  it  that  way."  That, 
of  course,  may  or  may  not  be  absurd,  according  to 
circumstances.  If  an  institution  has  always  carried 
out  some  trivial  ceremonial  or  custom  of  courtesy 
in  a  particular  way,  its  continuance  seems  rather  a 
fine  thing;  but  if  a  vital  function  of  the  institution  is 
performed  in  a  wasteful  or  blundering  manner, 
simply  because  no  one  has  had  sufficient  intelligence 
to  do  it  otherwise  —  that  is  a  totally  different  thing. 
From  this  kind  of  tradition  the  state  universities  are 
happily  free:  there  is  nothing  to  prevent  altering 
their  machinery  in  any  way  that  will  tend  toward 
greater  efficiency. 

This  is  why  the  easterner  finds  subjects  in  a 
western  state  university  curriculum  that  tend  to 
make  him  gasp.     A  "professor  of  poultry,"  such 


86  The  Different  West 

as  Wisconsin  has,  would  stir  Yale  or  Princeton  to 
indignation  or  ridicule;  not  because  facts  about 
poultry  are  not  worth  knowing,  or  are  not  easily 
and  satisfactorily  taught  by  an  expert,  but  because 
such  a  chair  would  not  be  in  accordance  with  the 
"traditions"  of  the  institutions.  Wisconsin,  or 
Kansas  or  Nebraska,  is  not  bothered  with  traditions 
of  that  sort.  Traditions  of  the  trivial  and  harm- 
less sort,  however,  they  are  rapidly  picking  up. 
Take  the  "  college  yell,"  for  instance.  The  average 
student  imagines,  I  suppose,  not  only  that  college 
yells  have  existed  since  the  dawn  of  time,  but  that 
his  particular  college  has  practised  and  cherished  its 
particular  yell  from  the  remotest  antiquity.  Now, 
most  of  us  remember  when  colleges  had  no  "yells." 
The  "three  times  three"  of  Harvard,  afterward 
adopted  also  by  Yale,  was  hardly  a  distinctive 
university  cry,  nor  was  it  intended  as  such.  Most 
of  the  earlier  "fancy"  yells  arose  as  jests.  The 
famous  excerpt  from  the  Frog  Chorus  of  Aris- 
tophanes, now  used  by  Yale,  notably  had  its  origin 
in  this  way.  Now  they  are  all  traditional,  and  the 
western  universities  have  their  traditions  with  the 
rest. 

A  notable  instance  of  a  more  fundamental  dif- 
ference between  eastern  and  western  colleges  is 
the  fact  that  practically  all  of  the  latter,  and 
none  of  the  former,  are  co-educational.     The  de- 


Coeducation  87 


mand  that  woman  should  share  man's  privilege 
of  a  university  education  was  heard  and  answered 
both  in  the  West  and  in  the  East,  but  the  western 
answer  was  to  admit  women  to  the  higher  institu- 
tions of  learning  on  the  same  footing  with  men, 
while  the  eastern  answer  was  to  create  separate 
colleges  for  them,  either  quite  apart,  as  at  Vassar, 
Wellesley,  and  Smith,  or  in  affiliation  with  the  older 
universities,  as  at  Radcliffe  and  Barnard. 

This  difference  in  response  may  be  due  m  part 
to  the  fact  that  economic  reasons  forbade  the  crea- 
tion in  the  West  of  separate  institutions  when  the 
working  machinery  already  existed  in  others.  Still 
more,  however,  was  it  due  to  the  basic  fact  that  in 
the  East,  tradition  is  king,  and  co-education  in  the 
higher  learning  was  there  contrary  to  tradition. 

Once  more;  examine  the  relations  between  mem- 
bers of  a  university  faculty  and  between  these  and 
the  students,  in  the  East  as  compared  with  the  West. 
I  have  sat  in  a  faculty  group  in  a  western  state 
university,  in  the  rooms  of  one  of  their  number. 
All  were  merrily  jesting  and  drinking  beer,  and 
with  them  sat  the  honored  president  of  the  univer- 
sity, similarly  employed.  Many  holders  of  western 
chairs,  if  perchance  their  eyes  fall  on  this  page,  will 
ask,  with  open  eyes,  "Weill  why  not?"  There 
is  absolutely  no  reason  "why  not;"  but  if  you  go  to 
Cambridge,  or  New  Haven,  or  Princeton  to  see  a 


88  The  Different  West 

similar  gathering,  you  will  wait  until  the  infernal 
regions  are  sheathed  with  a  very  heavy  coating  of  ice. 

I  may  be  wrong:  my  own  acquaintance  with 
eastern  faculties  is  twenty  years  old.  Perhaps  they 
have  learned  some  western  customs;  I  know  that 
they  have  benefited  by  an  influx  of  western  blood. 
That  in  itself  was  almost  unheard  of  twenty  years 
ago;  perhaps  some  other  things  have  also  been 
added  unto  them. 

Still,  however  this  may  be,  there  is  formalism 
rather  than  comradeship  in  the  attitude  of  members 
of  an  eastern  university  faculty  toward  one  another, 
and  especially  doth  the  president  stand  or  sit  aloof. 
And  it  is  much  the  same  as  between  professor  and 
student.  They  are  much  nearer  in  the  West  than 
in  the  East,  and  it  is  better  for  both.  There  is 
more  love  and  not  less  respect. 

Another  distinction  between  eastern  and  western 
universities  is  that  the  latter  are  more  local,  the 
former  more  continental.  This  is  natural,  since 
there  was  a  time  when  the  eastern  institutions  were 
the  only  recourse  of  those  who  desired  a  college 
education.  The  habit  thus  formed,  and  the  tendency 
of  the  father  to  send  the  son  to  his  own  college, 
account  for  the  fact  that  an  Illinois  Yale  man  will 
often  send  his  sons  to  Yale  instead  of  to  the  Uni- 
versity of  Illinois,  and  that  a  Harvard  man  in 
Topeka  will  patronize  Harvard   rather  than  the 


Western  Universities  Local  89 

University  of  Kansas.  There  is  not  the  same  reason 
for  sending  an  eastern  boy  to  a  western  university, 
founded  for  purely  local  state  reasons,  and  it  is 
seldom  done;  although  as  these  institutions  gain 
prestige  and  their  alumni  become  more  widely  scat- 
tered, the  same  causes  may  operate  with  them  also. 
Furthermore,  the  alumni  of  the  eastern  colleges, 
and  even  the  college  authorities,  carry  on  a  more 
or  less  vigorous  campaign  in  the  Western  States. 

Every  large  place  has  its  association  of  Harvard, 
Yale^  and  Princeton  alumni,  and  even  of  graduates 
of  such  smaller  colleges  as  Amherst,  Williams,  or 
Dartmouth.  The  published  accounts  of  meetings 
make  public  the  existence  and  activities  of  these 
bodies,  and  the  fact  that  men  of  standing  in  the 
community  are  graduates  of  these  institutions.  Some 
such  bodies  see  to  it  that  the  advantages  of  their 
favorite  colleges  are  presented  to  the  senior  classes 
of  preparatory  schools,  both  public  and  private,  by 
illustrated  talks  given  by  graduates.  There  is  no 
such  propaganda  on  behalf  of  the  western  universi- 
ties. Proximity,  a  smaller  cost  of  living,  and  the 
absence  of  tuition  fees,  militate  in  their  favor;  but 
the  net  result  is  hardly  satisfactory,  as  the  line  of 
demarkation  is  drawn  too  much  on  the  basis  of  the 
dollar.  The  well-to-do  Princeton  man  in  Indiana, 
we  will  say,  sends  his  boy  to  Princeton  as  a  matter 
of  course;   the  one  with  a  more  moderate  income 


90  The  Different  West 

would  prefer  to  do  so,  but  can  afford  only  the  nearer 
state  university.  Likewise,  the  boy  who  is  attracted, 
perhaps,  to  Harvard  by  a  glowing  presentation  of 
its  charms,  given  before  his  high-school  class,  or 
by  reading  the  Harvard  papers  supplied  by  gradu- 
ates to  his  school  reading-room,  or  by  the  profuse 
Harvard  athletic  news  printed  in  his  local  papers, 
goes  only  if  he  can  afford  it — otherwise  not. 

This  selective  action  is  responsible  for  a  good 
deal  of  the  recent  talk  about  plutocracy  in  eastern 
universities,  for  it  is  a  natural  fact  that  most  of 
the  western  students  there  are  wealthy.  This  state 
of  things  has  worried  the  western  alumni  of  eastern 
colleges  more  than  a  little,  and  they  have  tried  of 
late  to  emphasize  in  their  propaganda  the  fact  that 
student  self-support  in  eastern  colleges  has  now  be- 
come frequent  and  easy,  and  that  there  is  no  reason 
why  an  industrious  boy  who  wants  to  go  to  such  a 
college  should  be  deterred  by  financial  reasons.  In 
Chicago  the  Yale  alumni  support  a  scholarship,  and 
the  desirability  of  extending  this  practice  has  been 
discussed  in  St.  Louis  and  other  cities.  However 
this  may  be,  it  seems  certain  that  the  eastern  univer- 
sities will  remain  for  some  time  more  continental  in 
their  appeal  than  the  western. 

Indeed,  the  state  university  as  a  hustling,  growing 
institution  is  a  thing  of  very  recent  date.  Twenty- 
five  years  ago  Michigan  was  the  only  one  heard  of 


University  Growth  91 

or  greatly  regarded  in  the  East.  The  others  were 
poorly  supported  and  had  to  struggle  for  recogni- 
tion and  existence.  This  state  of  things  has  been 
changed:  first,  by  the  growing  appreciation  of  higher 
education  by  the  bulk  of  the  western  population, 
wisely  and  skilfully  fostered  by  the  broad  policy  of 
the  universities  themselves,  which  are  cutting  loose 
from  the  academic  tradition  and  popularizing  their 
courses  by  laying  stress  on  practical  agriculture,  the 
breeding  of  domestic  animals,  and  similar  subjects; 
second,  by  recognition  of  the  fact  that  a  good  plant 
and  a  good  teaching  force  cost  money,  driven  home 
by  the  phenomenal  growth  of  such  non-public  insti- 
tutions as  the  University  of  Chicago,  founded  and 
supported  by  wealthy  patrons;  and,  lastly,  by  the 
dawning  consciousness  in  the  mind  of  the  rural  legis- 
lator that  a  university  president  must  needs  be  of 
somewhat  larger  caliber  than  the  principal  of  a 
country  school.  The  state  universities  as  now  con- 
ducted on  broad  lines,  with  ample  state  appropria- 
tions, by  capable  administrators,  have  a  great  future 
before  them  and  are  coming  into  their  own  with 
a  rapidity  that  Is  hardly  recognized  in  the  East 
and  that  is  astonishing  to  westerners  with  eastern 
affiliations. 

Any  account  of  education  in  the  West,  however 
brief  and  sketchy,  would  not  be  complete  without 
mention  of  the  part  played  by  this  region  in  great 


92  The  Different  West 

extra-scholastic  educational  movements  such  as  the 
formation  and  affiliation  of  women's  clubs  and  the 
growth  and  extension  of  public  libraries.  Both  are 
due  to  a  recognition  of  the  fact  that  education  does 
not  cease  with  school  and  college  life,  and  that  it  Is 
part  of  our  legitimate  business  to  see  that  it  proceeds 
on  proper  lines,  both  In  our  own  cases  and  In  those 
of  our  companions  and  fellow  citizens.  In  the  case 
of  the  woman's  club  these  efforts  are  purely  those 
of  private  cooperation;  with  the  library  they  have 
proceeded  on  a  public  and  civic  basis.  Both  clubs 
and  libraries  have  Increased  throughout  the  country, 
but  the  part  played  by  the  West  in  their  multiplica- 
tion, and  the  hearty  recognition  given  to  them  there 
as  civic  agencies,  are  noteworthy. 

In  the  West  the  woman's  club  Is  a  force  that  must 
be  reckoned  with.  Even  those  of  the  male  sex  who 
regard  these  organizations  with  amusement  and 
smile  at  the  courageous  way  In  which  they  attack  and 
discuss  the  deep  questions  of  philosophy,  science, 
and  political  economy,  acknowledge  that  at  last  the 
women  have  an  organization  that  must  be  respected 
and  taken  Into  account.  These  organizations  have 
club-houses  that  compare  favorably  with  those  of 
the  men's  clubs;  they  take  an  active  Interest  In  public 
and  civic  questions  that  puts  most  of  the  masculine 
organizations  to  shame.  The  man  who  said  that 
he  took  a  great  interest  in  women  because  his  mother 


Women's  Clubs  93 


was  one,  was  making  more  than  a  jest.  As  the 
mother  is,  the  son  is;  and  who  can  estimate  the 
influence  on  our  coming  generation  of  a  motherhood 
genuinely  interested  in  good  literature,  in  moral  up- 
lift, in  civic  righteousness? 

Step  by  step  with  the  rise  of  the  woman's  club 
in  the  West  has  gone  that  of  the  public  library. 
Women's  clubs  have  been  responsible  in  hundreds 
of  cases  not  only  for  the  inception  of  the  library 
but  also  for  the  impulse  that  has  caused  the  com- 
munity to  undertake  its  support.  In  states  having 
no  adequate  library  law,  women's  clubs  have  worked 
for  such  a  law  and  secured  its  passage.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  library  has  worked  for  and  with 
the  woman's  club  in  furthering  and  carrying  on  its 
educational  program.  The  sympathy  between  the 
two  depends  not  only  on  their  similar  aims,  but  also 
on  the  fact  that  libraries  are  so  largely  operated  by 
women  assistants.  In  many  cases  the  responsible 
heads  of  libraries  have  been  women  who  are  also 
influential  in  club  life.  All  this  has  favored 
cooperation. 

The  so-called  library  movement  of  the  past  twenty 
years  has  been  largely  an  extension  of  the  library's 
scope,  accompanied  by  entrance  of  more  progres- 
sive and  capable  workers  into  the  library  field  and  a 
consequent  wider  recognition  of  the  library's  worth 
to  the  community,  expressed  especially  in  increased 


94  The  Different  West 

financial  support  from  the  public  and  also  in  large 
donations  from  private  sources. 

In  this  extension,  western  libraries  have  done  pio- 
neer work.  Open  access  first  attracted  librarians' 
attention  as  practised  on  a  large  scale  in  the  Cleve- 
land Public  Library;  work  with  children  was  done 
in  Milwaukee,  Cleveland,  and  other  western 
libraries  before  it  was  recognized  in  the  East;  com- 
mission field-work,  as  now  largely  operated,  orig' 
inated  in  western  states.  Cooperation  with  schools 
was  carried  on,  on  a  large  scale,  in  St.  Louis  when 
unheard  of  in  the  East.  In  fact,  the  atmosphere  of 
free  Inquiry  and  experiment,  characteristic  of  the 
West,  has  made  Itself  felt  In  a  peculiarly  effective 
way,  in  this  important  educational  work. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

LITERATURE   IN  THE   WEST 

"D  OSTON  and  its  vicinity  used  to  have  almost 
-■-'  a  monopoly  of  American  literature.  The  pub- 
lishing houses  were  there;  the  authors  were  chiefly 
there  —  or,  if  not,  they  had  to  go  there  to  sue  for 
recognition.  The  New  York  school  —  Halleck, 
Morris,  Willis,  and  the  rest — if  we  except  Wash- 
ington Irving  —  cut  but  a  sorry  figure  in  the  literary 
pantheon  of  those  days.  Poe  —  our  greatest  lit- 
erary genius  —  was  embittered  by  the  thought  that 
he  stood  without  the  sacred  pale. 

This  monopoly,  so  far  as  it  still  exists,  has  passed 
to  New  York,  largely  for  the  same  reason  that 
Harvard  used  not  to  win  football  games  —  close- 
corporation  in  genius  is  never  permanent.  It  may 
be  that  for  a  few  years  all  the  good  writers  in  the 
country  may  live  in  Boston,  but  such  a  condition  will 
pass  —  and  it  has  passed.  Boston  does  not  welcome 
the  outsider  and  so  he  stays  outside  and  plays 
football,  or  writes  books,  in  a  more  congenial 
atmosphere. 

This  can  not  happen  to  New  York  because  she 
has  always  made  the  outsider  at  home.     In  fact, 

95 


g6  The  Different  West 

she  has  done  this  to  such  an  extent  that  she  has  be- 
come a  city  of  outsiders.  They  have  swamped  and 
hidden  the  "native  New  Yorkers" — a  mythical 
genus.  When  one  hears  of  a  man  who  has  come 
into  prominence  in  New  York,  one  asks  instinctively, 
"Where  did  he  come  from?"  and  expects  to  hear 
that  he  was  brought  up  in  Maine,  or  Indiana,  or 
Tennessee;  the  idea  that  he  may  have  been  born  in 
New  York  never  seems  to  occur  to  anybody. 

This,  of  course,  is  what  makes  New  York  "  cos- 
mopolitan," but  it  is  a  little  hard  for  the  rest  of  the 
country.  It  is  especially  hard  on  the  writers  of  the 
rest  of  the  country,  for,  unless  they  go  into  journal- 
ism. New  York  is  apt  to  spoil  them.  This  it  does 
by  sybaritic  influences,  by  flattery,  in  all  sorts  of 
underground  ways.  Social  favor  is  particularly  in- 
sidious; it  spoiled  poor  N.  P.  Willis,  who  might  have 
amounted  to  something  if  he  had  stayed  in  Boston 
where  he  belonged.  It  has  spoiled  and  is  spoiling 
more  good  writers  today  than  most  people  realize. 
I  withhold  names  because  I  am  afraid  of  libel  suits; 
but  discriminating  readers  will  have  no  trouble  in 
making  out  a  list  of  promising  writers  from  New 
England,  the  West,  and  the  South  who  have  made  a 
splendid  start,  have  gone  to  New  York  and  then 
fizzled  out  completely.  I  mean  from  a  literary 
standpoint,  of  course;  some  of  them  have  made 
money  hand  over  fist. 


Western  Literary  Groups  97 

O,  the  pity  of  it  I  Others  have  sensibly  stayed  at 
home  and  are  doing  conscientious  work  there.  Good 
advice  to  the  ambitious  western  hterary  worker  who 
wants  to  go  to  New  York  would  be  that  of  Mr. 
Punch  to  persons  about  to  marry,  namely,  "  Don't  I " 
Even  Bryant  would  have  been  a  greater  poet  if  he 
had  stayed  in  New  England,  although  doubtless  he 
would  not  have  been  so  good  a  journalist. 

If  all  western  writers  had  resisted  this  insidious 
influence  there  would  today  have  been  a  western  lit- 
erary school  of  considerable  numbers  and  influence. 
Even  as  it  is,  the  respectable  number  of  those  who 
have  stayed  at  home  is  responsible  for  local  groups 
that  can  not  be  overlooked.  The  so-called  Indiana 
writers  will  occur  to  the  reader  at  once.  That  there 
should  be  a  "  literary  centre  "  in  this  state  seems  to 
be  regarded  by  the  eastern  papers  as  a  huge  joke. 
It  is  hard  to  see  why.  It  may  well  be  that  a  num- 
ber of  good  writers  are  now  living  near  Indianapo- 
lis just  as  a  number  once  lived  near  Boston.  This 
and  other  groups  are  discovering  local  literary  ma- 
terial—  that  is  a  hopeful  sign.  William  Allen 
White  tells  us  of  Kansas,  Mrs.  Watts  of  Columbus, 
Ohio,  Winston  Churchill  of  St.  Louis,  and  so  on. 
Frank  Norris  was  surely  wrong  when  he  asserted 
that  the  only  places  in  the  United  States  about  which 
a  story  may  be  told  are  New  York,  Chicago,  and 
San   Francisco.      "  Imagine,"    he   says,    scornfully, 


98  The  Different  West 

"writing  a  story  about  Nashville,  Tenn.,  or  Buffalo, 
N.  Y. !  "  O.  Henry,  quoting  this  exclamation,  takes 
up  the  challenge  and  proceeds  to  write  about  Nash- 
ville, Tenn.,  the  best  story  he  ever  penned  —  a  tale 
full  of  wit,  human  interest,  character,  excitement, 
and  pathos  —  and  withal  so  local  that  it  could  have 
been  written  about  no  other  city  than  Nashville. 
At  its  close  he  remarks  reflectively:  "I  wonder 
what's  doing  in  Buffalo,  N.  Y.?" 

There  is  doubtless  plenty  doing  in  Buffalo;  and 
when  an  O.  Henry  arises  to  tell  us,  we  shall  surely 
know  of  it.  There  are  stories  to  tell — nay,  there 
are  histories  and  biographies  to  write ;  there  is  local 
botany,  zoology  and  geology,  sociology  and  archae- 
ology, in  thousands  of  western  towns,  scattered 
through  the  valleys  of  the  Mississippi  and  its  tribu- 
taries; strewn  over  the  apparently  monotonous 
plains  of  Illinois,  Indiana,  Kansas,  and  Iowa.  When 
we  say  that  a  place  has  no  history,  we  mean  simply 
that  no  one  has  yet  arisen  to  appreciate  it  and 
write  of  it;  when  we  say  that  such  and  such  a  his- 
tory is  dull,  we  mean  only  that  the  writer  was  un- 
able, or  did  not  think  it  worth  his  while,  to  make 
it  interesting. 

Wherever  a  western  author  may  live,  however,  he 
usually  goes  to  New  York  to  have  his  book  pub- 
lished. That  publishing,  as  now  conducted,  is  chiefly 
a  commercial  enterprise  is  strikingly  illustrated  by 


Western  Publishers  99 

its  concentration  in  the  commercial  metropolis. 
The  casual  reader  invited  to  name  offhand  a  pub- 
lisher not  located  in  New  York  would  be  apt  to  be 
puzzled.  Boston  and  Philadelphia  hold  on  to  a 
few,  nominally  at  least  and  as  a  matter  of  senti- 
ment. In  the  West  there  are  some  brave  attempts, 
and  they  seem  to  be  succeeding.  The  time  may 
come  when  publishing  is  no  longer  purely  business 
and  when  a  good  man  can  carry  it  on  in  Oskaloosa, 
Iowa,  or  Tuscumbia,  Ala.,  as  well  as  anywhere  else. 
Already  great  New  York  firms  are  finding  it  con- 
venient to  have  at  least  the  manufacturing  part  of 
the  work  done  outside  the  city.  And  if  one  large 
firm  can  profitably  move  to  rural  Long  Island,  it  is 
hard  to  say  why  someone  else  may  not  presently 
make  a  still  longer  "trek."  Possibly  this  may  de- 
pend somewhat  on  specialization;  certain  it  is  that 
most  of  the  publishing  firms  who  have  secured  what 
seems  to  be  a  permanent  foothold  in  the  West  are 
specializing  successfully.  Chicago  is  almost  the  only 
western  city  where  a  large  general  publishing  busi- 
ness is  successfully  carried  on.  Elsewhere  in  the 
West  there  is  specialization  in  such  subjects  as  his- 
tory, bibliography,  and  a  certain  type  of  fiction,  not 
too  high  in  grade  but  undeniably  popular. 

Specialization,  too,  is  the  note  sounded  by  the 
few  magazines  now  issued  in  the  West.  Besides 
the  inevitable  medical  and  pharmaceutical  period- 


lOO  The  D liferent  West 

icals  we  have  such  publications  as  the  Technical 
World  Magazine  and  Popular  Mechanics  of  Chi- 
cago, although  these,  for  the  general  reader,  are 
distinctly  specialized.  About  the  only  general  maga- 
zine in  the  region,  The  World  To-day  of  Chicago, 
was  recently  purchased  by  W.  R.  Hearst  and 
removed  to  New  York.  There  would  appear  to  be 
a  field  in  the  West  for  the  purely  local  magazine, 
which  is  as  yet  almost  untrod.  There  might  be  at 
least  one  of  these  in  each  state,  devoted  to  the 
description  and  discussion  of  local  industries,  civic 
improvement,  rural  conditions,  state  history  and 
biography,  power-development,  and  so  on.  The 
most  of  this  kind  of  literature  that  has  any  value  is 
now  issued  by  railways  as  part  of  their  campaign 
of  publicity.  This  is  done  far  more  in  the  West 
than  in  the  East,  and  some  of  it  is  excellently 
done  —  deserving  of  a  more  permanent  setting. 

There  is  one  kind  of  periodical,  however,  that 
deserves  treatment  by  itself  —  that  is  the  newspaper. 
Some  critics  are  apparently  forgetting  that  it  is  a 
periodical,  like  all  the  rest.  If  a  man  writes  an 
article  of,  say,  5000  words  for  a  monthly,  they 
regard  it  as  worthy  of  note;  if  he  does  the  same 
thing  for  a  daily,  it  is  beneath  contempt.  Some 
libraries  are  seriously  discussing  whether  they  shall 
not  drop  the  dailies  from  their  periodical  lists,  giv- 
ing up,  for  instance,  the  New  York  Evening  Post, 


Western  Newspapers  loi 

the  Boston  Transcript,  and  the  Springfield  Repub- 
lican, and  clinging  to  the  Broadway  Magazine  and 
Munsey.  Yet  the  daily  is  closer  to  the  people  than 
any  of  them,  and  will  be  more  valuable  than  any 
others  to  the  historian  of  a  century  hence.  Sensible 
libraries  are  keeping  as  many  files  as  they  dare  and 
the  student  of  comparative  life  and  customs  in  differ- 
ent regions  can  do  no  better  than  to  go  to  the  daily 
papers  first  of  all.  If  there  are  differences  worth 
discussing  between  East  and  West,  some  of  the  most 
important  may  surely  be  expected  to  crop  out  in 
these  same  papers. 

The  usual  criticism  of  modern  American  news- 
papers is  that  they  are  controlled  by  "  the  interests." 
So  stated,  it  would  appear  not  to  be  a  legitimate 
complaint.  A  journal  must  be  controlled  by  some 
man  or  by  some  body  of  men,  commercial,  political, 
or  scientific.  It  is  hard  to  see  why  ownership  by 
the  Meat  Trust  or  the  Standard  Oil  Company 
should  be  more  objectionable  than  ownership  by 
John  Smith,  the  Christian  Science  Church,  the  Pro- 
hibition Party,  or  the  National  Academy  of  Science. 
The  trouble  is  that  in  former  days  the  owner's  name 
was  always  known  and  his  control  was  open, 
whereas  nowadays,  except  in  the  case  of  religious 
papers,  it  is  generally  kept  quiet  and  the  control  is 
secret.  Where  there  is  ostensible  control  it  is  gen- 
erally not  the  real  one. 


102  The  Different  West 

A  paper  purporting  to  be  the  organ  of  the  Repub- 
lican or  Democratic  Party  is  really,  perhaps,  the 
mouthpiece  of  the  Cordage  Trust;  the  sheet  which 
announces  on  its  title-page  its  adherence  to  high  pro- 
tection may  be  only  the  personal  tool  of  Thomas 
Jones;  and  the  journal  that  is  supposed  to  be  owned 
and  edited  by  John  Smith  does  not  betray  the  fact 
that  this  gentleman  himself  is  owned  and  controlled 
by  the  Steel  Trust.  So  it  is  not  ownership  of  its 
papers  by  the  Interests  that  the  public  has  to  object 
to;  it  is  the  fact  that  the  ownership  is  concealed  or 
misrepresented.  And  an  additional  grievance  is 
that  the  concealment  and  misrepresentation  them- 
selves are  unknown  to  many  and  denied  by  others. 
We  do  not  know  who  is  responsible  for  what  we 
read  or  from  what  standpoint  it  is  written.  Doubt- 
less the  failure  to  label  journals  plainly  "  The  Prop- 
erty of  the  Umbrella  Trust,"  "  The  Personal  Organ 
of  Pierpont  Rockefeller,"  and  so  on,  is  due  to  the 
popular  prejudice  against  large  corporations  and 
those  identified  with  them.  The  influence  of  the 
paper  will  be  greater,  it  is  thought,  if  the  source 
and  nature  of  that  influence  is  concealed.  This  is 
just  but  not  far  sighted.  Its  result,  so  far,  has  been 
to  discredit  American  journalism  very  largely  among 
thinking  people.  It  is  leading  to  an  interesting 
revival  of  personal  journalism,  not  in  the  form  of 
the  daily  paper  but  of  the  weekly,  of  the  type  exem- 


Personal  Journalism  103 

pllfied  and  perhaps  originated  by  Labouchere's 
Truth  in  London  —  written  largely  by  one  person, 
irresponsible,  trenchant,  sometimes  a  little  scandal- 
ous, yet  wielding  great  influence  simply  because  its 
readers  believe  it  to  be  fearless  and  independent. 
Its  adherents  prefer  to  read  the  real  opinions  of  a 
man  with  whom  they  only  partially  agree,  rather 
than  sentiments  written  to  order  by  an  employee  of 
some  corporation. 

This  new  personal  journalism,  as  might  be  ex- 
pected, flourishes  particularly  in  the  West.  I  do  not 
know  of  any  prominent  example  in  the  great  eastern 
cities,  but  in  the  West  we  have  The  Public,  of 
Chicago,  edited  by  Louis  F.  Post;  The  Mirror,  of 
St.  Louis,  by  William  Marion  Reedy;  The  Bellman, 
of  Minneapolis;  Bryan's  Commoner,  La  Follette's 
Weekly,  and  many  others.  These  papers  are  all 
readable  and  worth  reading.  The  ordinary  daily 
journalism  of  the  West  is  much  like  that  of  the  East, 
but  rather  more  local.  We  have,  however,  nowhere 
in  the  country  a  daily  that  sees  the  real  continental 
values  —  probably  because  we  have  not  yet  a  public 
that  sees  them.  This  is  what  despairing  publicists 
mean  when  they  say  that  the  United  States  is  not  a 
"nation."  We  have  not  got  away  yet  from  the 
attitude  of  the  Revolutionary  War,  when  the  colo- 
nies were  practically  a  loose  group  of  allied  foreign 
countries,  when  the  Baltimore  dandies  in  the  Mary- 


I04  The  Different  West 

land  regiments  sneered  at  the  Vermont  backwoods- 
men, and  the  Massachusetts  farmers  were  jealous 
of  the  Pennsylvania  militia,  and  everybody  went 
home  when  he  pleased  and  obeyed  orders  when  he 
was  "good  and  ready."  We  should  have  been 
fighting  for  our  liberties  yet,  in  the  intervals  of  get- 
ting in  our  crops  and  of  attending  to  local  politics, 
if  the  French  had  not  lent  us  a  hand. 

If  we  were  even  now  a  homogeneous  nation,  with 
country-wide  national  pride  and  no  local  misunder- 
standings and  jealousies,  this  present  volume  would 
be  as  useless  as  the  far-famed  chapter  on  snakes  in 
Iceland.  Our  country-wide  newspapers,  or  our 
attempts  to  approximate  them,  are  all  in  the  East. 
If  a  foreigner  wants  to  get  daily  American  news  as 
opposed  to  that  of  Minnesota  or  Illinois  or 
Nebraska,  he  takes  one  of  the  New  York  dailies,  or 
the  Boston  Transcript,  or  the  Springfield  Repub- 
lican. 

Mr.  Bryce  tells  the  story  of  a  small  western  town 
with  four  daily  papers.  On  being  asked  how  such 
a  place  could  keep  up  four  papers,  a  citizen  aptly 
replied  that  it  took  the  four  papers  to  keep  up  the 
place.  The  questioner,  you  see,  had  confused  cause 
and  effect.  This  function  of  the  public  press  —  of 
advertising  or  booming  the  place  where  it  is  pub- 
lished, rests,  like  all  advertising,  on  a  perfectly  good 
psychological  basis;  but  it  is  sometimes  forgotten 


City  Pride  and  Rivalry  105 

that  other  principles  of  advertising  apply  here  also. 
In  the  first  place  there  must  be  something  to  adver- 
tise. All  the  money  in  the  world,  spent  on  pub- 
licity, would  not  sell  salt  as  sugar. 

This  sort  of  booming  leads  to  and  fosters  busi- 
ness rivalry  and  such  rivalry  often  ends  in  bitter 
feelings  that  are  inexplicable  to  an  easterner.  Such 
feeling  there  used  to  be  between  Chicago  and  St. 
Louis  before  the  former  city  grew  so  large  that 
it  was  forgotten.  Such  there  was  until  very  recently 
between  Tacoma  and  Seattle;  such  there  is  between 
the  "Twin  Cities" — St.  Paul  and  Minneapolis.  A 
Minneapolis  man,  being  asked  for  his  automobile  to 
assist  in  entertaining  some  visiting  delegation, 
replied  that  he  would  lend  it  on  one  condition  —  it 
must  not  enter  the  city  limits  of  St.  Paul.  This, 
which  seems  to  an  eastern  man  almost  incompre- 
hensibly childish,  was  perfectly  serious.  Without 
the  kindly  nagging  of  the  local  press,  these  jealousies 
would  not  so  often  arise  or  so  long  be  perpetuated. 

Another  adjunct  of  city  pride,  of  which  the  west- 
ern press  is  fond,  is  the  so-called  "  slogan  " — a  pithy 
sentence  embodying  in  epigram  the  advantages  and 
virtues  of  a  place  —  for  indiscriminate  use  in  electric 
signs,  on  banners,  programs,  circulars,  and  else- 
where. Tacoma  once  adopted  the  line  "Watch 
Tacoma  Grow";  but  when  she  didn't  grow  fast 
enough  and  was  outstripped  by  her  big  neighbor 


lo6  The  Different  West 

Seattle,  she  changed  it  to  "You'll  Like  Tacoma," 
which  has  more  of  the  permanent  element  in  its 
make-up.  Chicago  proudly  but  simply  says  "  I 
Will."  St.  Louis,  after  the  throes  of  an  extensive 
newspaper  competition,  awarded  a  $500  prize  to 
the  fortunate  composer  of  the  following  sentiment: 
"Some  cities  have  a  slogan;  St.  Louis  has  the 
goods."  All  of  which  is  taken  seriously  by  many 
citizens  and  furnishes  undoubted  material  for  news- 
paper discussion  in  an  off  season. 

The  local  character  of  the  western  press  has  ad- 
vantages that  it  would  be  wrong  to  overlook.  A 
paper  that  tries  to  keep  up  with  the  news  of  the 
whole  country  has  to  cut  its  local  news  pretty  short. 
The  result  is  that  in  New  York,  for  instance,  much 
of  the  purely  local  matter  is  taken  care  of  by  small 
papers  of  the  rural-press  type  —  weekly  sheets  look- 
ing out  for  the  interests  of  Harlem,  Washington 
Heights,  old  "  Greenwich  Village,"  Tremont,  a 
dozen  or  more  localities  in  such  boroughs  as  Rich- 
mond or  Queens.  Compared  with  these,  the  chief 
daily  papers  of  western  towns  of  10,000  to  15,000 
inhabitants  are  positively  metropolitan.  It  is  easy 
to  get  local  items  into  any  of  them,  but  they  will  be 
read  over  a  very  small  part  of  the  city.  To  induce 
the  New  York  papers  to  notice  a  local  event  or 
occurrence  it  must  be  of  importance  sufficient  to 
make  it  rank  as  news  outside  of  New  York  —  other- 


Western  Press  Local  107 

wise  the  local  sheets  must  take  care  of  It.  New 
Yorkers  know  little  of  what  Is  going  on  In  their 
city.  The  city  editor  of  the  New  York  Sun  once 
asserted  that  sufficient  good  stuff  was  left  out  of 
that  paper  dally  to  make  several  other  Issues  —  and 
good  ones,  too.  Presumably  a  large  part  of  this 
was  local. 

Now  there  Is  nothing  like  this  in  a  western  city. 
The  papers  there  print  great  quantities  of  local 
news.  Every  institution  is  followed  up  for  Items, 
the  Public  Library  is  a  daily  assignment,  like  the 
police  court.  Local  portraits  are  published  with 
very  slight  excuse.  The  reader  is  saturated  with 
local  atmosphere  and  when  he  finds  that  he  Is  get- 
ting a  little  out  of  touch  with  the  world  outside,  he 
begins  to  read  the  papers  of  other  cities.  This  is 
probably  done  to  a  much  greater  extent  in  the  West 
than  elsewhere,  simply  for  the  reason  just  stated. 


CHAPTER  IX 

SCIENCE   IN  THE  WEST 

'T^HE  WEST'S  science  is  predominantly  prac- 
■■-  tical.  All  science,  to  be  sure,  is  practical,  but 
we  have  not  all  found  it  out  yet.  The  man  who 
liked  the  Theory  of  Functions  "because  it  never 
could  possibly  be  put  to  any  use  "  was  misinformed. 
Every  bit  of  new  knowledge,  and  every  further  de- 
gree of  systematization  of  knowledge  already 
acquired,  has  some  bearing,  actual  or  potential,  on 
our  daily  life.  Civilization  has  been  advanced 
chiefly  by  belief  In  this,  or  at  any  rate  by  magnifi- 
cent disregard  of  Its  opposite. 

I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  pure  science  Is  neglected 
in  the  West — her  universities  furnish  proof  to  the 
contrary.  So  do  her  occasional  bodies  like  the  St. 
Louis  Academy  of  Sciences  with  an  honorable  record 
of  many  years  and  with  frequent  publication  of  the 
work  of  such  men  as  Chauvenet  in  mathematics,  of 
Trelease  in  botany,  or  of  NIpher  in  physics.  What 
I  do  mean  to  say  Is  that  the  lack  of  popular  appre- 
ciation of  science  for  Itself  alone,  which  is  notice- 
able throughout  the  United  States,  is  particularly 
evident  in  the  West.    The  attitude  of  the  press  in 

108 


Applied  Science  109 

matters  like  these  is  always  an  indication  of  the 
popular  mind.  A  meeting  of  the  British  Associa- 
tion for  the  Advancement  of  Science  is  reported  in 
the  London  papers  very  completely,  many  of  the 
addresses  being  given  in  full  and  the  whole  thing 
being  treated  seriously,  as  we  treat,  for  instance,  a 
national  political  convention.  In  the  New  York 
papers  a  meeting  of  the  American  Association  would 
be  lucky  to  get  a  column;  in  the  western  papers  it 
would  have  only  a  few  sticks,  if  it  were  mentioned 
at  all.  And  mention  of  the  proceedings  is  apt  to  be 
in  a  jocose  vein.  That  a  sane  man  should  devote 
time  and  money  to  clearing  up  some  obscure  point 
in  physical  science  or  natural  history,  or  still  more 
that  he  should  spend  his  life  in  the  service  of  some 
science  not  clearly  hitched  to  the  star  of  palpable 
dollars  and  cents,  seems  to  the  average  reporter, 
who  represents  the  average  citizen,  as  essentially 
ludicrous  and  childish. 

When  the  New  York  Sun  runs  short  of  the  efforts 
of  amateur  poets  or  the  odd  names  of  obscure  citi- 
zens, for  exploitation  in  humorous  editorials,  it  can 
always  make  a  hit  by  turning  over  to  its  "  funny 
man"  the  latest  entomological  bulletin  from  Wash- 
ington, whose  Latin  technical  names  introduced 
freely  and  commented  upon  in  the  Sun's  well-known 
vein  of  good-humored  satire,  are  in  the  estimation 
of  its  readers  screamingly  funny. 


no  The  Different  West 

Hardly  a  paper  in  the  country  includes  on  its 
staff  a  scientific  expert  —  a  person  through  whose 
hands  material  involving  scientific  fact  or  comment 
must  pass  before  it  is  approved  for  publication.  The 
Boston  Transcript  is  almost  our  only  paper  whose 
scientific  news  is  looked  upon  by  scientific  men 
otherwise  than  with  contempt. 

What  has  been  said  applies,  it  must  be  noted,  to 
pure  science.  As  soon  as  it  passes  the  border  line 
of  application  to  some  industry,  it  is  differently  re- 
garded. And  scientific  men  are  themselves  partly 
to  blame  for  this  state  of  things,  in  fostering  the 
idea  that  the  best  science  is  science  that  can  not  be 
applied.  The  best  science  is  doubtless  science  that 
does  not  look  for  application.  But  it  all  can  be 
applied  and  may  one  day  be  applied;  and  the  citizen 
whose  only  respect  is  for  the  application  will  doubt- 
less come  to  respect  the  science  too  when  he  realizes 
the  potentiality  of  it  all. 

Certain  problems  of  applied  science  the  West  has 
worked  out  or  is  working  out  for  itself  satisfac- 
torily. Chief  among  these,  perhaps,  is  that  of 
water-supply  where  the  only  source  is  the  muddy 
rivers  of  the  region.  In  St.  Louis,  for  instance, 
before  the  World's  Fair,  the  city  water,  drawn  from 
the  Mississippi,  was  so  filled  with  sediment  that  its 
normal  color  was  yellow  or  brown.  Deposition  of 
suspended  matter  took  place  in  an  ordinary  tumbler 


Water  Problems  in 

when  it  stood  for  any  length  of  time.  Water  for 
laundry  purposes  was  drawn  a  week  In  advance  and 
allowed  to  settle  in  barrels  before  it  could  be  used. 
A  commission  of  experts  reported  to  the  city  that 
it  was  impracticable  to  use  the  water  of  the  Mis- 
sissippi at  all  and  recommended  a  plan  to  bring  a 
supply  from  a  great  distance  at  an  estimated  cost 
of  $31,000,000. 

At  this  juncture  it  was  decided  to  try  another 
scheme,  whose  practical  details  were  worked  out  by 
a  young  St.  Louis  chemist,  Mr.  John  Wixford,  a 
graduate  of  the  city  schools  and  of  Washington  Uni- 
versity. This  plan  was  to  get  rid  of  the  sediment 
by  forming  in  the  water  by  chemical  action  a  coagu- 
lable  precipitate  that  would  stick  to  it  and  carry 
it  down  quickly.  This  proved  entirely  practicable, 
and  St.  Louis  has  since  enjoyed  water  of  crystal 
clearness,  free  not  only  from  mud  but  from  bac- 
teria, which  are  also  taken  care  of  in  the  general 
clearing-up  process. 

The  scheme  cost  just  $10,000  to  install  and  is 
operated  at  a  very  small  yearly  expense.  The  chem- 
icals used  are  cheap  and  easily  obtained  —  merely 
lime  and  copperas,  or,  chemically  speaking,  calcium 
hydrate  and  sulphate  of  iron.  Introduced  into  the 
muddy  water  these  at  once  react  to  form  sulphate  of 
lime  and  ferrous  hydrate.  There  are  further  and 
more  complicated  reactions  into  which  we  can  not 


112  The  Different  West 

enter  here,  but  in  general  the  lime  compounds  are 
dissolved  and  serve  merely  to  "harden"  the  water 
to  a  slight  degree,  while  the  iron  compounds  stick 
together  in  flocculent  masses  and  sink,  with  the  par- 
ticles of  sediment  and  the  bacteria.  Anything  that 
may  be  left  is  removed  by  rapid  sand  filtration.  A 
somewhat  similar  method  had  previously  been  used 
also  in  Quincy,  111.,  and  at  other  river  towns,  but 
its  adoption  on  such  a  large  scale  was  first  effected 
in  St.  Louis.  Thus  a  purely  western  problem  has 
been  solved  by  westerners  in  a  characteristically 
western  way,  simple,  effective,  and  thorough. 

Another  problem,  also  connected  with  the  rivers, 
is  that  of  water  transportation,  already  adverted  to 
in  a  previous  chapter.  The  use  of  the  great  west- 
ern rivers  for  freight  and  passenger  traflic  has  now 
almost  ceased,  railway  transportation  having  taken 
Its  place.  As  is  well  known,  an  earnest  effort  is 
being  made  to  revive  it,  and  one  feature  of  that 
effort  is  an  attempt  to  commit  the  national  govern- 
ment to  an  extensive  scheme  of  river  improvement. 
Experts  appear  to  differ  regarding  the  practicability 
of  the  various  plans  proposed.  Meanwhile  oppo- 
nents of  the  scheme  are  pointing  out  that  the  rivers 
are  the  same  as  they  were  fifty  years  ago,  and  are 
asking  why  they  are  not  utilized  again  in  their  pres- 
ent condition  before  any  attempt  is  made  to  render 
them  still  more  usable.     This  is  a  good  deal  like 


Western  Waterways  1 13 

objecting  to  the  substitution  of  electric  light  for  gas 
on  the  ground  that  a  revival  of  candles  is  among 
the  possibilities.  The  old  use  of  the  rivers  per- 
sisted while  it  was  the  only  possibility  and  despite 
great  inconveniences  and  disadvantages.  When  a 
better  means  of  transportation  was  devised,  the 
rivers  were  disused.  Now  a  scientific  study  of  the 
problem  shows  that  there  is  a  still  better  plan  —  a 
partition  of  the  traffic  between  the  railways  and  the 
improved  rivers.  The  adoption  of  this  plan  may 
be  slow,  but  despite  foolish  opposition  on  the  part 
of  the  railroads,  it  is  bound  to  come.  It  involves, 
of  course,  other  improvements  besides  that  of  the 
channels,  notably  in  the  construction  of  boats,  and 
the  handling  of  passengers  and  freight.  An  attempt 
has  been  made  to  carry  some  of  these  out  experi- 
mentally even  with  the  rivers  in  their  present  condi- 
tion, and  the  results  are  likely  to  be  interesting. 
They  should  not,  however,  delay  the  progress  of  the 
improved  waterway  scheme  as  a  whole,  and  doubt- 
less we  shall  see  this  other  peculiarly  western  prob- 
lem solved  also  by  westerners  in  a  western  way. 
An  old  Mississippi  pilot,  after  an  anxious  and 
tiring  night  of  steering  around  sandbars  and  dodg- 
ing wreckage,  turned  to  a  companion  in  the  pilot- 
house and  remarked  wearily,  "  If  I  had  the  man- 
agement of  the  Universe  I  should  make  this  river 
perfectly  straight,  with  a  full  moon  at  each  end." 


114  The  Different  West 

It  is  hardly  probable  that  any  such  extensive  im- 
provement as  this  will  take  place,  but  we  may  reason- 
ably expect  that  the  river  will  be  kept  at  a  uniform 
minimum  depth  and  that  the  banks  will  be  prevented 
from  caving  in  and  filling  it  up. 

It  is  interesting  to  see  how  these  technical  prob- 
lems affecting  the  West  cluster  about  the  great 
rivers.  A  third  in  our  list  is  the  use  of  these  rivers 
for  waterpower.  They  are  usually  of  great  volume 
but  small  fall.  The  Mississippi,  for  instance,  has 
been  utilized  to  any  great  extent  only  at  the  falls 
of  St.  Anthony,  at  Minneapolis.  Now,  however,  a 
great  dam,  to  develop  some  200,000  horsepower, 
is  under  construction  opposite  Keokuk,  Iowa,  at 
the  rapids  whose  great  energy  has  hitherto  been 
allowed  to  go  absolutely  to  waste.  Of  this  great 
power,  60,000  horsepower  has  already  been  con- 
tracted for  in  St.  Louis  alone.  Doubtless  we  shall 
see  in  the  future  a  hydro-electric  plant  at  every  rapid 
along  the  course  of  the  western  rivers.  Navigation 
will  not  be  impeded,  but  actually  improved,  since 
canals  are  even  now  generally  necessary  to  avoid 
these  rapids  and  the  water  backed  up  by  the  dams 
deepens  long  reaches  of  the  river  above. 

There  will  be  no  interference  with  scenery,  and 
objections  such  as  have  been  properly  made  to 
hydro-electric  development  at  Niagara  and  other 
great  falls,  will  not  apply. 


Supplementary  Irrigation  115 

Another  way  in  which  applied  science  has  come 
very  near  to  the  western  people  is  in  agriculture. 
Probably  nowhere  in  the  world  has  the  farmer  such 
a  respect  for  scientific  methods  —  properly  so,  for 
they  have  made  his  fortune  for  him.  He  readily 
votes  taxes  for  the  support  of  great  agricultural 
schools  and  experiment  stations  and  he  studies  their 
results  with  interest  to  see  how  they  may  be  applied 
on  his  own  land.  As  for  machinery,  he  uses  it  every- 
where; in  fact,  his  huge  farms  could  not  be  oper- 
ated without  it.  His  operating  force  of  men  Is  re- 
duced to  a  minimum.  He  has  under  cultivation 
square  miles  of  land  with  no  human  habitation  in 
sight.  Yet  he  is  not  lonely,  for  he  has  the  telephone 
to  communicate  with  his  neighbor  and  the  automo- 
bile to  reach  him  quickly  in  the  flesh. 

One  more  great  scientific  improvement  we  may 
look  for  on  the  farm  —  the  introduction  of  supple- 
mentary irrigation.  It  is  a  curious  fact  that  this 
method  has  chiefly  been  used  hitherto  in  desert 
places.  The  owner  of  a  Connecticut  farm  who  has 
spent  much  time  beyond  the  Rockies  tells  me  that 
there  is  scarcely  a  bit  of  land  in  the  United  States 
that  would  not  be  improved  by  it.  In  New  England, 
for  instance,  it  would  make  possible  two  crops  in  a 
summer  instead  of  one,  and  it  would  forever  re- 
move all  fear  of  drought.  A  single  rainstorm  that 
occurred  the  other  day  in  Arkansas  was  worth  to 


Ii6  The  Different  West 

that  state,  so  the  newspapers  say,  several  millions 
of  dollars.  If  this  is  so,  why  not  invest  a  little 
money  in  a  plant  to  protect  the  farmer  permanently 
against  drought?  In  fertile  Kansas  and  Nebraska 
it  may  ruin  all  the  crops  of  the  year,  whereas  we 
hear  of  nothing  of  the  kind  in  the  California  orange 
country,  although  that  was  originally  a  desert. 
Where  there  is  no  rain,  science  provides  the  equiva- 
lent; where  the  rain  fails  only  occasionally,  we 
philosophically  take  the  chances  of  disaster.  We 
may  look,  I  think,  to  a  future  where  the  farmer 
will  insist  on  being  made  independent  of  the  clouds 
in  Kansas  as  well  as  in  California  —  in  Oklahoma 
as  well  as  in  Oregon. 

Droughts  are  really  the  only  blot  on  western  agri- 
culture; in  spite  of  them  Kansas  and  Nebraska 
farming  lands  are  held  at  fabulous  prices;  with 
supplementary  irrigation  they  may  be  expected  to 
rise  even  higher. 

One  of  the  unsolved  problems  of  applied  science 
in  most  of  the  Middle-West  cities  is  that  of  the 
abundant  soft-coal  smoke.  Those  who  have  studied 
the  subject  assure  us  that  soft  coal  may  be  burned 
without  excessive  smoke,  but  in  practice  not  only  are 
special  devices  —  patent  grates  or  mechanical 
stokers  —  almost  necessary  for  such  burning,  but 
even  with  their  aid,  black  smoke  will  still  appear 
at  the  time  of  stoking,  without  skilled  management. 


The  Smoke  Nuisance  1 17 

The  substitution  of  hard  for  soft  coal  is  not  only 
unlikely  but  undesirable.  Hard  coal  is  expensive 
in  the  Middle  West  on  account  of  distance  from 
the  anthracite  fields  of  Pennsylvania;  and  soft  coal 
is  abundant  and  near.  It  is  the  cheapest  and  most 
convenient  fuel-supply  known  to  man  —  easily 
handled  and  quickly  lighted  —  its  smoke  is  the  one 
objection  to  it.  Smoke-abatement  means,  therefore, 
the  installation  of  proper  smoke-consuming  devices 
in  connection  with  all  large  furnaces,  with  the  train- 
ing of  those  who  are  to  superintend  and  handle 
them;  and  the  general  education  of  the  public  in 
the  smokeless  management  of  domestic  furnaces, 
stoves,  and  grates,  without  such  devices.  The  use 
of  fuel-gas  is  also  an  important  factor  where  this 
is  available.  Natural  gas,  however,  though  a  per- 
fect solution  of  the  problem,  is  apt  to  be  only  a 
temporary  one,  as  shown  by  the  experience  of  Pitts- 
burg; and  manufactured  fuel-gas,  though  more  and 
more  widely  used  for  cooking,  is  still  too  expensive 
for  general  heating  purposes.  The  development  of 
hydro-electric  power,  as  at  the  great  Mississippi  dam 
at  Keokuk,  Iowa,  now  building,  may  also  offer  a 
partial  solution. 

But  at  present  the  problem  is  one  of  psychology. 
The  things  to  be  done  are  clearly  Indicated;  it  is  not 
so  easy  to  get  people  to  do  them.  The  first  thing 
that  the  enthusiastic  reformer  thinks  of  is  coercive 


Ii8  The  Different  West 

legislation.  It  can  not  be  said  that  this  has  proved 
successful  when  unaided.  When  a  man  is  required 
by  law  to  do  what  he  believes  to  be  impossible,  he 
simply  disobeys,  and  if  he  is  punished,  that  only 
arouses  his  undying  hostility  to  the  law.  Where 
smoke  has  been  sensibly  abated  it  has  generally  been 
done  by  dealing  with  each  case  as  it  arises,  demon- 
strating to  the  offender  that  his  plant  would  be 
smokeless  if  properly  run,  or  could  be  made  so  by 
the  expenditure  of  a  specified  sum  in  a  specified 
way.  Offenders  on  a  large  scale  can  be  turned  into 
law-abiding  citizens  in  this  way;  those  on  a  small 
scale  must  be  dealt  with  by  public  opinion. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  a  large  body  of 
citizens  in  every  smoky  town  is  accustomed  to  the 
smoke  and  does  not  mind  it;  and  believes  that  its 
abatement  is  an  impossibility,  or  that,  if  possible, 
it  would  drive  away  profitable  industries.  A  manu- 
facturer in  a  western  city,  whose  son,  home  for  his 
vacation  from  an  eastern  college,  objected  to  the 
smoky  atmosphere,  informed  the  boy  that  the  smoke 
was  profitable  and  healthful,  that  he  would  have  to 
get  used  to  it  and  like  it  and  that  if  he  found  it 
impossible  to  do  so,  he  would  have  to  go  back  to 
the  East. 

No  collection  of  notes  on  the  West's  problems  in 
applied  science  would  be  complete  without  a  word 
on  the  differences  between  the  railroads  of  the  East 


Railway  Competition  J 19 

and  the  West.  Some  of  these  have  already  been 
briefly  noticed.  Possibly  the  most  salient  point  of 
difference  is  that  in  the  East  the  roadbed  excels 
and  in  the  West  the  equipment.  In  the  East  the 
permanent  way  is  commonly  solid  and  expensive, 
with  double  or  even  quadruple  track  on  main  lines, 
whereas  in  the  West  most  of  the  lines  are  single 
and  the  roadbed  poorly  kept  up,  even  on  important 
systems.  On  the  other  hand,  the  general  average 
of  cars,  especially  of  passenger  day  coaches,  is 
poorer  in  the  East  than  in  the  West,  doubtless  on 
account  of  the  greater  amount  of  short  distance 
travel.  The  western  cars  are  apt  to  be  heavier 
and  better  lighted,  the  newer  types  of  steel  cars 
being  met  even  on  many  second-grade  systems. 

In  the  East  a  given  territory  is  served  by  fewer 
lines  than  in  the  West,  and  the  result  is  often  that 
the  service  is  more  satisfactory.  There  is  for  in- 
stance only  one  company  operating  trains  between 
New  York  and  Boston,  whereas  there  are  four 
between  Chicago  and  St.  Louis,  on  no  one  of  which 
is  the  service  as  good  as  on  the  eastern  line.  This 
is  in  spite  of  the  militant  competition  due  to  the 
existence  of  an  unnecessary  number  of  lines  and  may 
be  attributed  to  the  fact  that  business  which  would 
yield  a  good  profit  to  a  single  line  will  barely  pay 
the  expenses  of  half  a  dozen  or  so.  "Touting"  for 
business  is  much  more  active  in  the  West  than  in 


I20  The  Different  West 

the  East,  and  a  man  who  is  planning  a  thousand- 
mile  trip  may  expect  calls  from  the  representatives 
of  half  a  dozen  roads,  who  will  set  forth  their 
advantages  and  solicit  custom.  Despite  the  greater 
profit  of  freight  business  every  possible  effort  is 
made  to  stimulate  passenger  traffic.  The  literature 
issued  is  elaborate  and  well  conceived.  In  191 1  the 
St.  Louis  Public  Library  collected  400  volumes  of 
such  literature,  of  which  only  a  few  were  issued  by 
eastern  roads,  where  the  ordinary  travel  is  usually 
as  heavy  as  can  well  be  accommodated,  especially  in 
summer. 

All  this  competition  is  due  partly  to  the  facts  that 
consolidation  of  roads  has  been  more  thorough  in 
the  East,  and  that  the  building  of  unnecessary  com- 
peting lines  was  made  difficult  there  when  it  was 
easy  in  the  West;  and  also  in  large  part  to  the 
great  ease  of  running  lines  over  the  flat  prairie, 
where,  in  the  early  days  of  railroading,  there  was 
scarcely  any  grading  at  all,  and  the  rails  were  often 
moved  about  from  one  part  of  the  prairie  to 
another,  with  little  effort. 

Railway  competition  in  the  West,  however,  is 
solely  for  passengers  and  freight;  it  has  no  effect 
on  rates  or  speeds,  which  are  now  regulated  by 
agreement  between  the  roads,  much  to  the  detriment 
of  the  public.  State  governments  are  taking  a  hand 
in  rate-regulation,  but  they  have  not  tackled  the 


speed  Conditions  I2l 

speed  question  yet.  Eastern  express  speeds  vary 
frolm  forty  to  sixty  miles  per  hour;  in  the  West, 
even  where  the  quality  of  the  roadbed  does  not  limit 
speed,  it  is  kept  down  by  agreement.  All  trains 
between  Chicago  and  St.  Louis,  for  instance,  a  dis- 
tance of  280  miles,  require  eight  hours,  and  this  is 
quite  typical.  In  the  West  any  train  that  makes  an 
average  of  over  thirty  miles  an  hour  is  a  flyer. 
Conditions  are  improved  by  occasional  "  speed 
wars,"  but  soon  revert  to  their  former  state.  This 
does  not  apply  of  course  to  the  fast  expresses  on 
the  lines  between  the  Mississippi  and  the  Atlantic 
Coast,  which  may  make,  on  occasion,  speeds  as  high 
as  eighty  miles  an  hour  within  the  region  of  which 
we  are  now  speaking. 

So  far  as  western  roadbeds  are  concerned,  there 
is  a  notable  trend  now  toward  decided  improvement, 
as  in  the  double-tracking  of  the  great  main  lines 
such  as  the  Union  Pacific,  and  the  installation  of 
automatic  signals,  as  on  the  Missouri  Pacific  and 
the  Frisco. 

The  efforts  of  western  roads  to  "  make  business  " 
appear  also  in  their  attempts,  often  very  success- 
ful, to  build  up  industry  along  their  lines.  Their 
organizations  include  great  land  and  industrial  de- 
partments, and  much  of  the  literature  already 
referred  to  is  issued  in  connection  with  these.  The 
eastern  lines  do  little  work  of  this  kind,  although  the 


122  The  Different  West 

New  Haven  road  has  just  established  an  Industrial 
department  —  the  first  of  its  kind  in  the  East. 

Another  marked  difference  between  eastern  and 
western  railroad  travel  Is  the  fact  that  so  much  of 
the  latter  takes  place  at  night.  In  the  East  there 
is  considerable  through  travel  by  daylight,  espe- 
cially In  summer,  when  a  large  proportion  of  the 
passengers  are  women.  In  the  West,  daylight 
travel  is  mostly  local;  if  a  man  plans  a  trip  requiring 
8  to  12  hours  he  almost  always  goes  at  night.  Pos- 
sibly one  reason  for  this  may  be  the  monotony  of 
the  outlook.  We  Americans,  who  have  such  odd 
streaks  of  sentiment  In  our  materialism,  are  very 
fond  of  fine  scenery.  When  traveling  we  will  often 
stop  over  for  a  night  In  order  not  to  miss  a  day's 
ride  through  the  mountains.  Even  east  of  the  Mis- 
sissippi, trains  will  be  selected  and  schedules 
scanned  so  that  the  traveler  may  pass  the  Alle- 
ghanles,  or  the  Mohawk  Valley,  or  some  other 
choice  bit  of  scenic  territory  by  daylight.  But  across 
the  plains  or  over  the  prairies,  the  spice  of  variety 
is  absent.  One  hour  and  one  mile  are  as  good  as 
the  next,  and  the  passenger  might  as  well  sleep  away 
his  time. 


CHAPTER  X 

ART  IN  THE   WEST 

THE  measure  of  popular  appreciation  of  art  Is 
doubtless  not  the  existence  of  museums  or  pub- 
lic collections,  or  even  the  degree  to  which  these  are 
visited  by  citizens,  but  the  good  taste  displayed  in 
the  construction  and  arrangement  of  the  material 
things  used  or  met  with  in  daily  life  —  buildings, 
streets  and  parks,  domestic  implements,  ornaments, 
articles  of  clothing,  and  so  on.  Tested  thus,  modern 
appreciation  of  art  is  far  below  what  it  was  in 
ancient  Greece;  the  Germans  today  have  less  of  It 
than  the  French,  and  the  English  still  less.  We 
have  not  so  much  of  It  in  America  as  any  European 
country  has ;  and  there  is  less  of  it  in  the  West  than 
in  the  East.  The  Anglo-Saxon  race  has  never  ex- 
celled In  this  appreciation  of  the  beauty  of  common 
things  and  it  is  doubtful  whether  It  will  ever  do 
so. 

In  the  West  the  old  French  sub-stratum,  which 
might  have  favored  It,  has  been  pretty  well  snowed 
under.  Age,  which  makes  some  things  beautiful, 
independently  of  the  maker's  will,  Is  acting  to  some 
extent  in  the  West  as  it  has  done  earlier  In  the  East; 

123 


124  ^^^  Different  West 

but  unfortunately  the  West  does  not  like  relics.  As 
a  general  thing  only  the  old  appreciate  antiquities, 
and  the  West  is  still  young  enough  to  despise  them. 
The  Catholic  Church,  which  is  old  enough  to  ven- 
erate things  for  their  age  alone,  preserves  its  land- 
marks, but  about  every  other  relic  in  the  average 
western  town  is  destroyed  ruthlessly  when  its  imme- 
diate usefulness  has  passed. 

Ordinary  utensils  are  mostly  ugly  all  over  the 
United  States:  the  West  can  claim  no  distinction  in 
this  regard.  There  is  not  even  any  good  domestic 
art  indigenous  to  the  soil,  as  there  is  west  of  the 
Rockies  where  the  forms  and  decoration  of  pottery, 
buildings,  textiles,  etc.,  made  and  used  by  the  In- 
dians, are  so  good.  Indian  utensils  found  over  the 
Middle  West  are  always  interesting  and  sometimes 
artistic,  but  they  are  prehistoric  and  can  have  no 
effect  on  modern  life  as  the  art  of  the  Navahos  and 
the  Hopis,  for  instance,  incontestably  has. 

In  architecture  the  West  is  doing  well,  and  in  this 
respect  there  seems  to  be  a  genuine  and  growing 
appreciation  of  beauty  and  good  taste  applied  to  a 
utilitarian  end.  Recent  residential  sections  in  west- 
ern cities  are  apt  to  be  beautiful,  that  is,  if  we  look 
at  each  residence  separately.  There  is  little  "  team 
work,"  but  that  may  come  later.  The  wealthy 
donor  of  a  memorial  chapel  in  a  New  York  suburb 
stipulated  that  she  should  design  and  construct  the 


Beaux- Arts  and  Bizarre  125 

building  in  her  own  way,  afterward  turning  it  over 
to  the  trustees  of  the  church  to  which  she  was  giving 
it.  The  memorial,  while  built  as  an  annex  to  the 
church,  proved  to  be  in  a  totally  different  style  and 
altogether  incongruous  with  it.  Asked  the  reason, 
the  good  lady  replied:  "  I  didn't  want  it  to  be  like 
the  church.  I  wanted  it  to  be  so  different  that  people 
would  ask  as  they  passed,  'Why!  what  is  that?' 
and  would  be  told:  'That  is  the  Smith  Memorial 
Chapel!'"  By  a  similar  wish  —  the  desire  to  be 
conspicuously  different  —  have  most  of  our  house- 
builders  been  actuated.  Better  far  to  live  in  south- 
ern California,  where  you  have  to  build  in  the 
Mission  style,  whether  you  want  to  or  not. 

A  New  York  wit  once  remarked  that  there  were 
in  that  city  only  two  architectural  styles,  "  the  Beaux- 
Arts  and  the  Bizarre."  The  West  has  been  happily 
free  from  this  bondage  to  a  single  school,  however 
good;  and  odd  and  grotesque  though  some  of  her 
buildings  may  be,  it  is  hardly  possible  to  place  in 
this  class  all  that  have  not  been  designed  by  a  single 
coterie  of  architects.  It  is  said  that  Denver  owes 
the  attractiveness  of  its  residence  sections  to  the  fact 
that  a  group  of  young  Beaux-Arts  men  happened  to 
be  on  the  spot  just  at  the  time  when  the  rising  for- 
tunes and  the  inclinations  of  the  successful  miners 
acted  together  to  produce  a  building  boom.  How- 
ever this  may  be,  the  city  boasts  of  many  creditable 


126  The  Different  West 

private  houses,  and  the  Paris  school  is  of  course 
welcome  to  whatever  part  of  the  credit  it  deserves. 
Doubtless  it  deserves  much  throughout  the  West, 
but  it  is  probably  well  that  there  are  others  to  claim 
their  share  of  praise. 

So  far  as  what  is  generally  called  "  art "  is  con- 
cerned —  the  formal  production  and  exhibition  of 
painting  and  sculpture  —  the  West  is  doing  her 
share.  It  is  an  interesting  fact  that  New  York  has 
never  been  able  to  capture  the  leadership  in  art,  in 
the  United  States,  as  she  has  that  of  commerce, 
finance,  and  literature.  Her  literary  supremary  won 
from  Boston  not  long  ago,  she  will  not  hold  undis- 
puted. tThat  has  been  discussed  in  a  previous  chap- 
ter. But  the  supremacy  in  art  she  has  never  held. 
Great  artists  have  not  lived  and  painted  there.  The 
wonderful  subjects  to  be  found  in  her  streets  and  on 
her  waterways  are  just  beginning  to  find  recognition. 
She  has  had  no  preeminent  art  school.  No  one  pro- 
fessional association  has  been  able  to  hold  all  her 
artists.  The  National  Academy  is  national  only  in 
name.  There  is  no  proper  home  for  current  art 
exhibitions  in  the  great  city.  Philadelphia  —  de- 
spised Philadelphia  —  leads  the  metropolis  in  art 
matters,  and  dozens  of  other  smaller  cities  stand 
abreast  of  her.  New  York's  Metropolitan  Museum 
stands  unrivaled,  but  merely  because  the  gifts  of  mil- 
lionaires have  put  it  in  funds. 


Museums  and  Clubs  127 

/In  the  West,  Chicago  and  St.  Louis  both  have 
noteworthy  art  museums  and  popular  appreciation 
of  them  is  greater  than  in  most  eastern  cities.  Chi- 
cago has  the  best  site  for  popular  work;  the  St. 
Louis  museum,  which  is  the  permanent  part  of  the 
World's  Fair  art  section,  necessarily  stands  on  the 
site  of  that  fair,  in  Forest  Park,  inaccessible  to 
the  great  mass  of  the  public.  It  will  have  to  be  sup- 
plemented by  exhibitions  down  town  if  the  great 
bulk  of  the  population  is  to  be  reached.  But  even 
with  this  handicap  the  interest  shown  in  it  is  note- 
worthy. I  think  we  may  say  that  in  the  West,  even 
more  than  in  the  East,  people  are  well  disposed 
toward  art.  Like  the  cautious  French  student  whom 
Arago  asked  ironically  if  he  had  ever  seen  the 
Moon,  they  "have  heard  it  spoken  of."  There  is  a 
disposition  among  all  to  welcome  it  and  wish  it 
well.  But  the  tendency  is  to  think  of  it  as  some- 
thing apart  from  daily  life.  It  is  an  Anglo-Saxon 
tendency  which  is  felt  also  by  religion.  We  like  to 
keep  these  things  severely  in  their  places  —  to  be 
able  to  water  the  milk  (or  the  stock)  on  week  days 
and  attend  Divine  Worship  on  Sundays;  to  look 
out  of  our  ugly  offices  all  day,  at  the  ugly  buildings 
across  the  ugly  street  and  then  go  home  to  gaze 
at  the  Corots  and  Daubignys  that  our  millions  have 
enabled  us  to  acquire.  But  although  this  feeling  is 
stronger  in  the  West  than  in  the  East,  there  are 


128  The  Different  West 

also  more  hopeful  signs  of  a  revolt  against  it  in 
the  former  region.  There  is  nothing  in  the  East, 
so  far  as  I  know,  quite  like  the  Artists'  Guild  of 
St.  Louis.  The  Authors'  Club  in  New  York  resem- 
bles it  but  has  for  its  basis  purely  literary  work. 
The  Salmagundi  and  similar  organizations  do  not 
take  its  place. 

The  "  Arts  and  Crafts  Movement "  is  strong  in 
the  West  and  has  perhaps  received  somewhat  more 
than  the  average  amount  of  sympathy  and  appre- 
ciation from  the  ordinary  citizen. 

To  the  production  of  good  painting  and  sculp- 
ture the  West  is  contributing  notably,  both  by  fur- 
nishing subjects  and  those  who  can  interpret  them. 
The  effect  of  a  great  work  of  representative  art  — 
painting,  sculpture,  drama  —  depends  on  two 
things.  A  mathematician  would  say  that  it  is  "  a 
function  of  two  variables" — the  thing  represented 
and  the  state  of  mind  of  the  artist.  In  the  proper 
balance  of  these  factors  lies  the  success  of  the  work. 
The  painter  who  tries  to  paint  as  much  like  a  pho- 
tograph as  possible,  shutting  out  the  personal  ele- 
ment altogether,  fails;  but  so  also  does  he  who  tries 
to  express  himself  by  a  representation  that  succeeds 
only  in  obeying  the  Second  Commandment  literally 
in  looking  like  nothing  "  in  heaven  above,  or  the 
earth  beneath,  or  the  waters  under  the  earth."  The 
expression  of  one's  self  is  the  important  thing,  to 


Western  Subjects  in  Art  129 

be  sure,  provided  one  has  something  worth  while 
to  contribute,  but  the  thing  through  whose  repre- 
sentation that  expression  is  to  be  accomplished  is 
not  unimportant.  I  do  not  believe  that  a  man  can 
express  as  much  in  a  picture  of  an  apple  on  a  plate 
as  he  can  in  a  landscape,  nor  that  he  can  express 
just  the  same  things  in  a  landscape  that  he  can  in 
a  group  of  figures.  And  yet  it  is  the  manner  rather 
than  the  matter  that  constitutes  art. 

There  is  yet  matter  in  the  West,  waiting  for  the 
western  artist  to  express  himself  and  to  express  the 
West  —  its  largeness,  its  restlessness,  its  impatience 
of  control.  The  eastern  artist  who  "goes  West" 
for  his  subject  seldom  stops  short  of  the  Rockies, 
or  perhaps,  like  Remington,  he  goes  on  to  the  sage- 
brush and  alkali  of  Wyoming  or  Arizona.  The 
West  in  our  present  sense  is  yet  to  be  painted  in 
its  largeness  and  freeness,  and  its  own  sons  must 
do  the  work.  Parts  of  it  have  been  done,  and  done 
well.  No  one  has  painted  the  Mississippi  River 
like  Sylvester  of  St.  Louis;  the  Chicago  River  has 
its  interpreter  in  Clusman  of  that  city;  Meakin 
paints  Ohio,  and  the  "Hoosier  group" — Stark, 
Adams,  Forsyth,  and  Steele  —  the  country  about 
Indianapolis.  But  the  West  depicted  in  all  its  full- 
ness as  the  Dutch  painters  have  given  us  Holland 
or  as  Sorolla  has  painted  present  day  Spain,  is,  it 
seems  to  me,  yet  in  the  womb  of  Time.     I  do  not 


130  The  Different  West 

know  who  is  to  depict  it  if  not  some  painter  or  some 
school  of  painters  from  the  West  itself.  And  when 
it  is  done  it  will  not  be  done  in  the  French  or  the 
German  or  the  Italian  style,  or  in  imitation  of  any- 
thing or  anybody,  but  with  originality. 

The  depressing  thing  about  most  American  art 
exhibitions  is  the  obvious  imitation.  The  French 
impressionists  hit  on  a  way  to  depict  the  delicate 
play  of  color  on  the  surfaces  of  objects  —  a  wonder- 
ful method  though  sacrificing  somewhat  the  impres- 
sion of  solidity  and  actuality  of  those  objects.  At 
once  scores  of  painters  try  to  do  the  same  thing 
and  succeed  only  in  conveying  the  impression  that 
trees,  rocks,  and  buildings  are  themselves  pink,  yel- 
low or  lilac  instead  of  merely  reflecting  light  of 
those  colors.  Another  artist  produces  wonderful 
effects  by  slapping  on  pigment  with  a  palette-knife, 
and  a  swarm  of  others  immediately  adopt  the 
method,  without  producing  the  effects.  So  it  goes; 
and  the  same  is  true,  of  course,  in  any  other  art, 
such  as  poetry  or  music.  Originality  is  the  only 
thing  that  counts,  and  it  is  the  only  thing  that  can- 
not be  imitated. 

Now  Americans,  least  of  all  those  of  the  West, 
are  by  no  means  imitators  in  other  fields.  In  me- 
chanics, for  instance,  we  have  long  led  the  world  in 
boldness  and  originality  as  well  as  in  fertility  of 
invention.     There  seems  to  be  no  reason  why  we 


Imitation  in  Art  13 1 

should  not  be  bold,  original,  fertile,  and  successful 
in  art  also,  as  soon  as  our  bold  and  original  spirits 
see  in  art  something  that  is  worth  their  while.  So 
long  as  art  is  something  for  ladies  to  putter  at  or 
for  badly  paid  and  incompetent  workmen  to  bungle 
over,  this  realization  will  remain  far  distant.  Curi- 
ously enough,  the  first  dawn  of  a  new  day  shines 
forth  not  in  our  painting  but  in  our  sculpture,  and 
the  sculpture  and  sculptors  of  the  West,  especially 
when  dealing  with  western  subjects,  do  her  great 
credit.  There  is  something  virile  about  sculpture 
that  holds  the  western  imagination,  and  it  may  be 
that  in  this  form  of  art  the  West  is  to  excel  and  so 
to  find  its  true  expression. 

"It  takes  two  to  tell  the  truth,"  says  an  old 
writer,  "one  to  speak  and  the  other  to  listen." 
Likewise  does  it  take  two  to  give  a  work  of  art  its 
value  —  one  to  create  and  one  to  appreciate.  The 
greatest  art  is  that  of  the  man  who  causes  you  to 
imagine  that  you  see  what  he  desires  you  to  see. 
The  shadow  on  the  snow  in  yonder  picture  has 
little  to  do  with  the  artist's  brush-marks,  as  you  may 
see  if  you  step  nearer  and  regard  the  picture  close 
at  hand.  The  shadow  is  in  your  brain,  and  is  partly 
there  because  you  know  you  ought  to  see  it.  Yet  the 
suggestion  is  the  work  of  the  artist  —  and  that  is  his 
art.  Such  art  there  cannot  be,  however,  without  the 
party  of  the  second  part,  the  person  suggestible  to 


132  The  Different  West 

the  artist's  efforts.  The  condition  of  his  mind  re- 
acts on  the  artist;  if  the  suggestion  buds  and  blooms 
in  his  imagination,  the  artist  is  encouraged;  if  not, 
he  is  likely  to  take  up  the  photographic  style  that 
suggests  nothing  to  the  imagination,  and  represents 
only  a  low  type  of  art. 

Thus  it  is  encouraging  when  one  sees  even  fail- 
ures in  an  attempt  at  this  kind  of  painting;  its 
very  existence  shows  the  presence  of  appreciative 
spectators. 

Standing  in  a  crowded  western  art  museum  I 
heard  one  man  say  to  another,  "  How  many  of  these 
people  understand  what  they  see?"  If  he  meant 
to  ask  how  many  appreciate  the  technique  of  the 
artists  at  whose  works  they  gaze,  the  answer  must 
be,  "Very  few."  But  the  understanding  of 
technique  is  not  the  appreciation  of  art.  It  is  not 
at  all  necessary  in  order  to  receive  the  artist's 
message;  it  may,  indeed,  interfere  with  such  recep- 
tion. The  artist  who  paints  or  the  poet  or  musician 
who  writes,  solely  to  Interest  his  fellow  artists  in 
the  way  in  which  he  does  it,  is  not  an  artist  of  uni- 
versal appeal,  which  means  that  he  Is  not  truly  great. 
The  great  artist  is  great  among  artists  and  also 
among  those  who  know  nothing  of  art,  provided 
only  their  senses  and  their  minds  are  in  proper 
shape.  When  an  art-gallery  is  thronged  with  per- 
sons who  are  evidently  enjoying  what  they  see,  such 


Music  in  the  West  133 

questions  as  I  have  quoted  are  superfluous.  It  takes 
little  observation  to  pick  out  those  who  have  the 
common  sense  that  is  necessary  to  look  at  a  picture, 
as  it  is  necessary  to  most  acts  in  this  world  of  ours. 
The  man,  for  instance,  who  has  not  noticed  that 
the  best  pictures  are  so  painted  that  they  must  be 
seen  from  one  particular  distance,  and  that  only  — 
who  regards  a  canvas  from  a  viewpoint  of  six 
inches,  and  seeing  only  brush  marks  and  unblended 
colors,  concludes  that  he  does  not  like  art,  may  be 
seen  in  any  miscellaneous  gallery  crowd.  He  does 
not  yet  form  part  of  the  intelligent  public  that  the 
artist  must  reckon  with;  yet  even  he  requires  but 
a  word  to  set  him  right. 

A  love  for  good  music  is  one  of  the  things  for 
which  the  West  has  to  thank  its  German  citizens. 
Why  the  Germans  should  be  the  leading  musical 
people  in  the  world  is  a  hard  problem  to  solve ;  they 
do  not  look  it,  whereas  the  Latin  peoples  decidedly 
do.  But  why,  if  music  is  a  Teutonic  gift,  did  not 
our  own  Teutonic  forefathers  transmit  it  to  us? 
The  English  are  probably  the  most  unmusical  nation 
on  earth;  what  hope  there  is  for  us  Americans  we 
have  largely  from  the  leaven  of  other  peoples  that 
has  been  and  is  working  on  us. 

Music  is  like  language:  the  only  way  to  under- 
stand it  is  to  listen  to  it.  There  is  no  use  in  trying 
to  teach  a  babe  to  talk  by  giving  him  lessons  in 


134  The  Different  West 

grammar  and  rhetoric.  When  he  knows  one  lan- 
guage these  will  help  him  to  acquire  another,  and 
likewise  a  listener  that  understands  the  musical  lan- 
guage of  Beethoven  but  not  that  of  Debussy  may  be 
helped  by  verbal  explanation.  But  just  as  the  way 
to  resume  specie  payments  was  to  resume,  so  "  the 
way  to  listen  to  music"  is  to  listen  and  to  listen 
much  and  attentively.  The  presence  of  other  list- 
eners who  evidently  like  what  they  hear  is  a  potent 
factor  in  the  increase  of  musical  appreciation  in  a 
community,  and  here  is  where  the  Germans  have 
done  such  good  service.  The  West  still  suffers,  it 
is  true,  from  the  prevailing  American  contempt  of 
things  done  on  a  small  scale.  Unless  a  town  is  big 
enough  to  support  a  Boston  symphony  orchestra  or 
a  Metropolitan  Opera,  it  may  as  well  throw  up  the 
sponge,  according  to  this  view.  Salvation  from  this 
belief  is  to  be  found  in  the  multiplication  of  per- 
formers, as  opposed  to  mere  listeners.  If  there  are 
in  a  town  a  large  number  of  persons  who  sing  or 
who  play  on  some  musical  instrument,  the  existence 
of  musical  organizations  will  come  as  a  matter  of 
course.  This  is  the  way  that  it  works  in  Germany, 
and  when  the  German  leaven  has  worked  so  far  that 
it  is  also  the  case  in  small  western  cities,  the  West's 
musical  life  will  have  been  put  on  a  new  foundation. 
As  for  western  theatres,  they  are  chiefly  houses 
where  traveling  companies  play  for  engagements  of 


The  Drama  135 

a  single  night  to  a  week  or  two  —  sometimes  longer. 
For  the  larger  cities  there  are  certain  advantages  in 
this,  but  the  disadvantages  outweigh  them.  The 
advantages  are  those  common  to  all  systems  of  peri- 
patetic interchange.  The  Methodist  ministry  has 
been  operated  on  that  basis  for  a  long  time  and 
those  concerned  appear  to  be  satisfied  with  it;  but 
it  has  never  commended  itself  to  other  Christian 
bodies.  The  churches  and  the  clergy  both  get  va- 
riety; there  is  no  monopoly  of  what  is  good  on 
either  side;  no  one  has  time  to  get  into  a  rut.  On 
the  other  hand,  there  Is  no  element  of  stability  or 
permanence  in  such  an  arrangement.  Everyone  con- 
cerned is  looking  forward  to  the  next  move,  and 
there  is  hardly  time  to  become  accustomed  to  one 
set  of  conditions  before  another  takes  its  place. 

It  may  be  said  that  the  peripatetic  theatrical  sys- 
tem is  not  common  to  the  West,  or  to  small  places, 
at  all.  The  old-fashioned  stock  company,  as  we 
saw  it  at  Wallack's  or  Daly's  in  New  York,  In  the 
Boston  Museum,  or  at  Mrs.  John  Drew's  in  Phila- 
delphia, is  practically  obsolete.  There  are  no  "  one- 
night  stands"  In  New  York,  but  the  difference  is 
one  of  quantity  rather  than  of  quality.  Sooner  or 
later  every  play  and  every  actor  goes  "  on  the 
road" — even  the  Metropolitan  Opera  Company. 
This  Is  true,  and  yet  the  same  play  may  run  at  the 
same  theatre  In  New  York  for  a  whole  season. 


136  The  Different  West 

Things  have  time  to  get  settled  as  they  never  do  in 
stays  of  a  few  nights  each  in  small  cities.  One 
would  rather  see  any  favorite  actor  in  New  York 
than  at  a  one-night  stand.  Why?  Good  acting 
is  a  very  sensitive  plant:  it  responds  quickly  to  con- 
ditions and  environment  and  a  "first  night,"  popu- 
lar though  it  may  be,  is  never  the  best  night  at  a 
playhouse.  Obviously,  then,  in  a  tour  made  up 
chiefly  of  "first  nights"  no  theatrical  company  can 
do  itself  justice. 

Again,  under  present  conditions  there  is  no  East 
or  West,  no  North  or  South  in  theatrical  matters; 
the  country  is  one  huge  circuit,  and  no  section  has 
an  opportunity  to  express  itself,  despite  sectional 
dramas  like  In  Mizzoura,  The  Nigger,  and  the  like. 
From  this  point  of  view  the  drama,  as  a  representa- 
tive art,  is  surely  not  in  a  satisfactory  state,  but  the 
West  now  simply  shares  conditions  common  to  all 
the  United  States. 

The  state  of  the  arts,  one  and  all,  in  any  com- 
munity depends  somewhat  on  the  way  in  which  they 
are  taught  or  fail  to  be  taught,  to  the  young. 

American  educational  institutions  have  just  begun 
to  awaken  to  their  duties  in  the  matter  of  art  instruc- 
tion. Fifty  years  ago  no  one  of  them  taught  litera- 
ture with  any  insistence  on  the  fact  that  it  is  an 
art;  as  for  music,  painting,  and  sculpture,  they  were 
treated  with  contempt.    This  is  being  slowly  reme- 


Art  Instruction  137 


died.  In  the  West,  musical  instruction  in  the  com- 
mon schools  is  being  taken  up,  and  taken  up  in  the 
right  way.  Universities  are  introducing  courses  in 
music  and  art.  When  I  was  told  the  other  day 
that  a  promising  musician  —  a  young  man  —  had 
gone  to  the  University  of  Nebraska  at  Lincoln  to 
study  counterpoint  and  composition  my  first  feeling 
was  one  of  surprise,  not  unmingled  with  amusement; 
my  next  was  a  thrill  due  to  the  realization  that  the 
musical  West  is  coming  into  her  own. 

No  longer  is  the  artistic  progress  of  the  univer- 
sity student  to  be  gauged  by  the  childish  lays  of  the 
average  college  glee  club  and  the  disheartening 
drawings  in  the  average  college  paper.  These 
things  are  looking  up,  and  nowhere  more  than  in 
the  West.  The  Anglo-Saxon  may  never  count  art 
as  his  stronghold;  but  we  may  at  least  hope  that  he 
is  at  last  saying  good-by  to  the  age  of  artistic  igno- 
rance, childishness,  and  triviality  in  which  he  has  so 
long  complacently  dwelt. 


CHAPTER  XI 

SOCIETY   IN   THE   WEST 

'T^HE  whole  subject  of  social  standing  in  the 
-*•  United  States  has  been  greatly  neglected  by 
writers  and  students.  Making  a  list  of  countries  In 
the  order  of  fixity  of  social  status  and  its  relationship 
with  beliefs,  occupations,  and  other  social  phenom- 
ena, we  should  doubtless  find  India,  with  its  caste 
system,  at  one  extreme  and  the  United  States  at  the 
other.  In  India,  given  a  man's  caste,  one  may  know 
at  once  not  only  his  occupation,  habits,  religious 
belief,  and  general  attitude  of  mind,  but  those  of 
his  ancestors  and  descendants.  Passing  through  the 
list  of  countries  where  it  is  less  and  less  possible 
to  infer  any  such  connection,  we  arrive  finally  at  our 
own,  where  it  is  least  possible.  It  would  be  wrong 
to  conclude,  however,  that  no  conclusions  of  the  kind 
may  be  drawn  here.  They  follow  more  easily  in 
the  East  than  they  do  in  the  West.  In  no  land  prob- 
ably, for  instance,  is  there  a  total  divorce  between 
social  status  and  occupation.  In  many  countries  the 
latter  depends  strictly  on  the  former.  In  the  United 
States  the  dependence  is  rather  the  other  way,  but 
not  wholly.    We  may  infer  that  the  day-laborer  is 

138 


Social  Standing  139 

not  an  intimate  in  the  house  of  the  bank-president; 
that  is,  we  infer  his  social  standing  from  his  occupa- 
tion; but  it  is  also  true  that  the  bank-president's 
son,  however  impoverished  he  might  become,  would 
rarely  think  of  resorting  to  manual  labor  of  this  kind 
for  support.  In  other  words,  we  may  infer  occupa- 
tion from  social  standing  to  some  degree  even  in 
this  country. 

Perhaps  this  is  the  place  to  define  what  may  be 
meant  by  a  "  social  scale."  It  is  a  very  easy  matter, 
as  it  depends  solely  upon  the  possibility  of  intimate 
personal  association.  If  you  acknowledge  that  it  is 
impossible  that  a  given  man  should  ever  invite  you 
to  his  house  for  dinner,  and  that  you  would  feel 
greatly  honored  if  he  did  so,  you  thereby  acknowl- 
edge him  as  your  social  superior.  If  he  invites  you 
and  you  still  feel  flattered  by  the  invitation,  the 
difference  between  you  is  less,  but  he  is  still  above 
you.  If  you  exchange  and  accept  invitations  freely 
with  no  feelings  of  the  sort,  you  are  social  equals. 
If  you  hesitate  about  accepting  his  invitation,  and 
think  that  you  are  conferring  a  favor  if  you  do,  you 
regard  him  as  your  social  inferior;  still  more  so  if 
you  would  never  think  either  of  accepting  his  invi- 
tation or  of  inviting  him  yourself. 

But,  you  say,  how  about  the  other  fellow?  Is  he 
willing  to  accept  your  and  his  relative  positions  in 
the  social  scale  as  you  evaluate  them?     In  a  land 


140  The  Different  West 

where  the  social  scale  is  absolutely  fixed,  yes.  In 
India  there  is  not  the  slightest  doubt  on  either  side. 
In  England  there  is  not  much.  In  America  there  is 
a  great  deal.  A  may  consider  himself  B's  social 
superior,  when  in  the  estimation  of  B  their  positions 
are  reversed.  Still,  if  we  take  positions  far  enough 
apart  on  the  scale,  the  difference  is  generally  recog- 
nized on  both  sides;  that  is,  if  we  accept  the  cri- 
terion of  dinner  invitations.  A  and  B  may  each  look 
down  socially  on  the  other;  neither  would  then  think 
of  inviting  the  other,  or  of  accepting  his  invitation. 
If  A  and  B,  however,  are  really  far  enough  apart, 
the  unwillingness  of  A  to  invite  B  is  generally  accom- 
panied by  great  willingness  of  B  to  accept  if  invited. 
So  much  for  my  test  of  social  position,  of  which  I 
make  a  present  to  any  aspiring  sociologist  who 
wishes  to  experiment  further  with  it. 

I  leave  to  this  gentleman,  whoever  he  may  be,  the 
interesting  task  of  drawing  up  a  list  of  occupations 
in  various  lands  in  the  order  of  their  social  value. 
The  order  would  not  be  by  any  means  the  same  in 
all  countries,  or  in  the  same  country  at  all  times. 
Commercial  occupations  have  risen  in  the  social 
scale  in  England;  the  professions  are  still  relatively 
lower  there  than  in  the  United  States.  In  a  small 
American  town,  no  one  stands  higher  than  the  local 
lawyer,  physician,  and  clergyman;  in  an  English 
village  of  similar  size  there  is  always  a  landholder  — 


Public  Office  and  Society  141 

a  squire  —  to  overtop  everyone  else.  Here,  differ- 
ences between  West  and  East  are  slight  and  almost 
vanishing;  but  it  is  probably  true  that  in  the  West 
commerce  stands  relatively  higher  and  the  profes- 
sions lower  than  in  the  East.  The  tradition  of 
clerical  dominance,  which  still  lingers  in  parts  of 
New  England,  for  instance,  has  never  existed  there. 
The  lawyer  is  important  politically  but  not  neces- 
sarily socially.  State  or  national  office  has  not  the 
standing  that  it  has  in  the  East.  In  many  countries 
the  possession  of  an  office  raises  one  at  once  in  the 
social  scale.  There  is  something  of  this  sort  at 
Washington  and  at  one  or  two  state  capitals,  but 
not  in  the  West.  The  word  "un-American"  has 
been  overworked,  but  I  believe  it  finds  its  place  here. 
The  bestowal  of  social  standing  on  a  person  simply 
because  he  holds  office  is  especially  objectionable  in 
this  country,  where  offices  are  commonly  elective. 
Were  it  generally  acknowledged  it  would  make  un- 
available for  office  many  men  of  force  and  ability 
who  are  not  "  clubbable "  or  whose  wives  are 
regarded  as  "  impossible." 

To  begin  at  the  top,  there  is  absolutely  no  social 
parallel  between  the  President  of  the  United  States 
and  a  foreign  monarch.  The  latter  is  the  social 
head  of  his  country;  in  England  he  is  little  else. 
To  bestow  any  such  position  on  the  President  is 
absurd,  and  although  there  has  always  been  an  effort 


142  The  Different  West 

to  do  so,  its  social  writs  have  scarcely  run  beyond 
the  boundaries  of  the  District  of  Columbia.  The 
newspaper  custom  of  dubbing  the  President's  wife 
the  "first  lady  in  the  land"  is  not  only  ridiculous, 
but  harmful.  A  man  once  told  me  that  he  intended 
to  vote  against  the  presidential  candidate  of  his  own 
party,  one  of  the  best  equipped  men  who  ever  sat 
in  the  chair,  because  his  wife  was  unfitted,  for  some 
reason  or  other,  to  be  "  first  lady." 

Our  offices,  from  the  President's  down,  are  busi- 
ness positions,  and  should  be  filled  for  merit,  not  for 
social  standing.  Only  in  the  case  of  ambassadors  to 
foreign  countries  should  this  have  weight.  In  Rome 
we  must  do  as  the  Romans  do;  but  on  the  soil  of 
the  United  States  we  are  the  "Romans"  ourselves, 
and  our  customs  should  govern. 

As  I  have  said,  there  is  little  of  this  kind  of  thing 
in  the  West.  There  is  also,  less  than  in  the  East, 
the  feeling  that  social  superiority  carries  with  it  the, 
privilege  of  considering  one's  self  superior  in  other 
respects.  A  very  able  machinist,  we  will  say,  has 
not  those  qualities  that  would  make  him  a  welcome 
guest  at  your  table.  That  is  no  reason  why,  in 
conversing  with  him  about  machinery  —  a  subject 
in  which  he  is  your  acknowledged  superior  —  you 
should  condescend  to  him.  And  yet  you  surely 
would,  were  you  an  Englishman,  and  you  probably 
would  if  you  were  an  easterner.     You  might,  but 


Superior  and  Inferior  143 

you  would  not  be  so  likely,  if  you  were  a  westerner. 
A  Scotchman,  of  good  middle-class  position,  after 
a  few  days  in  this  country,  said  to  me:  "I  have 
never  in  my  life  seen  so  many  people  who  are 
aggressively  '  as  good  as  you  are.'  "  Now,  the  "  ag- 
gressiveness," if  it  were  really  present,  was  objec- 
tionable; nobody  ought  to  be  unpleasantly  aggres- 
sive, no  matter  what  his  social  status.  But  probably 
it  was  merely  the  absence  of  formal  British  obse- 
quiousness that  struck  the  good  man,  and  struck  him 
unfavorably,  as  everything  strange  does  strike  our 
transatlantic  cousins.  As  for  being  "  as  good  as  he 
was" — bless  his  heart;  so  they  were,  in  the  places 
where  they  came  into  contact  with  him.  They  were 
all  passengers  on  a  trolley  car  or  pedestrians  on  a 
sidewalk  together.  The  fact  that  many  of  them 
were  his  social  inferiors  had  no  more  to  do  with  it 
than  the  fact,  equally  certain,  that  some  of  them 
were  his  social  superiors.  The  idea  that  the  social 
inferior  should  behave  always  as  if  inferior,  whether 
in  social  contact  or  some  other,  is  a  relic  of  the  days 
when  before  the  law  the  social  superior  was  treated 
differently  from  the  inferior.  That  day  has  not 
entirely  passed,  but,  in  theory  at  least,  all  are  now 
treated  alike.  In  India,  as  Mr.  Price  Collier  notes, 
it  is  only  the  British  yoke  that  keeps  them  equal;  to 
the  native  it  is  almost  unthinkable  that  the  prince 
and  the  beggar  should  be  punished  alike  for  murder. 


144  The  Different  West 

And  to  the  Englishman  it  is  still  unthinkable  that 
an  ignorant  noble  should,  without  condescension,  ac- 
knowledge inferiority  in  any  respect  to  a  "humble" 
though  eminent  scholar.  In  the  western  United 
States,  perhaps,  more  than  elsewhere,  social  matters 
are  kept  within  their  own  sphere.  A  may  be  socially 
inferior  to  B,  his  equal  as  an  athlete,  and  far  supe- 
rior to  him  in  business  ability.  He  is  treated  in 
accordance  with  the  particular  contact  that  is  taking 
place  between  the  two. 

The  relation  between  religious  belief  and  social 
standing  is  another  curious  and  fascinating  subject 
of  study  for  the  investigator  of  differences  between 
the  East  and  the  West.  Such  a  connection  exists 
everywhere  and  is  usually  recognized,  though  little 
is  said  about  it.  In  parts  of  the  country  where  there 
was  an  established  church,  like  the  Congregational 
in  Connecticut  or  the  Episcopal  in  Virginia,  that 
church  has  always  kept  more  or  less  of  the  social 
prestige  that  once  belonged  to  it.  In  states  where 
there  was  no  established  church,  colonization  was 
sometimes  promoted  under  particular  religious  aus- 
pices, as  under  the  Catholics  in  Maryland  or  the 
Society  of  Friends  in  Pennsylvania  —  these  have 
retained  social  eminence.  The  fact  that  the  Epis- 
copal church  was  established  by  law  in  England 
gave  it  prestige  in  colonial  times  even  in  colonies 
where  it  was  relatively  weak.     The  Middle  West 


Sects,  East  and  West  145 

spent  its  colonial  days  as  a  Spanish  or  French  pos- 
session, but  it  was  never  colonized  in  the  same  sense 
as  the  states  on  the  Atlantic  seaboard,  and  the  re- 
ligious connections  of  its  masters  have  not  been 
handed  down  in  the  same  way.  These  connections 
were,  of  course,  predominantly  Catholic.  The 
Mississippi  Valley  is  rich  in  Catholic  memories,  but 
those  memories  are  largely  of  the  deeds  and  lives  of 
missionaries  who  worked  among  Indian  tribes  now 
vanished.  In  New  Orleans,  however,  and  to  a  lesser 
degree  in  St.  Louis,  Catholics  are  strong  socially; 
and  in  numerous  smaller  towns  where  the  French 
tradition  lingers,  the  same  is  true. 

In  general,  the  West  is  distinguished  from  the 
East  by  lack  of  any  one  or  of  any  few  religious 
denominations  to  which  social  eminence  attaches. 
Denominations  that  are  powerful  through  numbers 
contain,  of  course,  more  socially  powerful  individ- 
uals than  others.  The  Presbyterians,  Methodists, 
and  Baptists  are  thus  relatively  important  there,  the 
first-named  hardly  more,  perhaps,  than  in  the  East; 
the  others  certainly  far  more  so.  This  may  be 
explained  by  the  activity  of  Methodist  and  Baptist 
missionaries  in  the  West  in  days  when  the  Episco- 
palians, for  instance,  were  content  with  retaining  a 
local  foothold.  Some  denominations  common  in  the 
East  are  known  little  or  not  at  all  in  the  West,  and 
vice  versa.   For  instance,  the  Dutch  Reformed  church, 


146  The  Different  West 

so  familiar  in  New  York  and  New  Jersey,  Is  practi- 
cally unknown  there.  Congregationalism  is  a  root 
transplanted  from  the  East.  One  the  other  hand, 
the  Christians,  known  only  by  name  in  the  East,  are 
strong  in  the  West,  numerically  and  socially.  But, 
in  general,  it  may  be  said  that  members  of  different 
religious  communities  are  apt  to  meet  on  much  more 
common  social  ground  than  in  the  East.  I  know 
many  places  in  New  England  where  a  census  of  any 
representative  social  gathering  would  disclose  hardly 
any  others  but  Congregationalists  and  Episcopa- 
lians—  the  former  in  a  majority.  The  presence  of 
a  Catholic  would  be  almost  an  impossibility;  that 
of  a  Baptist  or  a  Methodist,  very  unlikely.  A 
census  of  a  similar  gathering  in  the  West  would 
probably  reveal,  besides  all  the  bodies  named  above. 
Christians,  Swedenborgians,  Lutherans,  and  so  on. 
It  need  hardly  be  said  that  this  difference  has 
nothing  whatever  to  do  with  religious  tolerance  or 
intolerance.  You  will  find  the  old  first  families  of 
Baltimore,  New  Orleans,  and  St.  Louis  largely 
Catholic  not  at  all  because  public  opinion  in  those 
cities  leans  toward  the  Catholic  doctrine.  The  fact 
that  you  might  live  for  years  in  a  Connecticut  town 
without  meeting  a  Methodist  socially,  while  half  of 
your  friends  might  be  of  that  connection  after  your 
removal  to  a  western  city,  does  not  mean  that  there 
is  any  religious  prejudice  against  Methodists  in  New 


Absence  of  a  Leisure  Class  147 

England.  These  things  have  their  causes,  but  they 
are  only  indirectly  connected  with  religion.  In  a 
small  New  England  town  forty  years  ago,  the  only 
Catholics  were  Irish,  and  the  only  Irish  were  day- 
laborers.  Hence,  obviously,  the  social  status  of  the 
Catholic  church  in  such  towns  was  humble.  In  the 
same  towns,  the  Methodists  and  Baptists  had  to 
take  the  "leavings"  of  the  population,  while  in  the 
West  they  were  first  on  the  field. 

All  denominations  are  more  liberal  in  the  West 
than  in  the  East.  By  "liberal"  I  mean  tolerant; 
I  do  not  mean  to  imply  that  there  is  any  general 
tendency  toward  free-thinking,  although  possibly 
there  are  more  individual  free-thinkers.  But  there 
seems  to  be  more  of  the  atmosphere  of  universal 
charity;  less  feeling  that  there  is,  and  of  necessity 
should  be,  a  high  board  fence  about  one's  own  par- 
ticular denominational  back-yard.  If  a  practical 
movement  for  Christian  unity  should  ever  arise,  we 
may  well  expect  it  to  start  in  the  Middle  Western 
States. 

There  is,  apparently,  no  leisure  class  in  the  West. 
The  ear-marks  of  such  a  class  are  almost  entirely 
absent  —  the  great  estates,  the  peculiar  type  of  club 
life  in  the  cities,  the  efforts  to  invent  strange  forms 
of  amusement  or  occupation  —  social  entertainment, 
philanthropy,  art,  all  gone  to  seed.  Not  that  condi- 
tions do  not  produce  those  who  might  live  in  leisure 


148  The  Different  West 

if  they  so  chose.  But  partly  they  do  not  so  choose ; 
and  those  who  do  choose  go  elsewhere  to  live,  where 
the  devices  for  supporting  such  a  life,  and  for  mak- 
ing it  more  supportable  to  those  who  live  it,  are 
already  well-developed.  There  is  little  for  a  retired 
millionaire  to  do  in  Milwaukee,  or  Indianapolis,  or 
Cincinnati,  or  even  in  St.  Louis  or  Chicago.  If  he 
does  not  go  abroad.  New  York  usually  claims  him. 
To  a  certain  extent  this  is  to  the  credit  of  the  western 
cities,  the  amusements  of  these  self-expatriated  gen- 
try being  usually  of  a  kind  that  their  native  places 
may  well  do  without.  So  far,  however,  as  it  means 
that  the  West  has  no  attractions  for  him  who  wishes 
to  live  the  life  of  a  quiet,  cultivated  gentleman, 
spending  his  money  in  the  gratification  of  the  best 
tastes,  it  is  doubtless  to  be  deplored.  If  the  West 
can  so  order  itself  that  these  latter  persons  of  leisure 
will  remain,  while  the  others  will  continue  to  emi- 
grate, all  will  be  well.  This  is  not  at  all  beyond  the 
bounds  of  possibility,  and  there  are  signs  that  it  may 
one  day  be  realized. 

Hospitality  and  neighborliness  are  far  more 
noticeable  in  the  West  than  in  the  East.  Other 
things  being  equal,  a  new  arrival  may  expect  more 
attention  there,  arising  simply  from  a  desire  to  make 
him  feel  at  home  and  to  ensure  that  he  receives  a 
favorable  impression.  This  sort  of  attention  is 
rare  in  the  East  and  is,  unfortunately,  becoming 


Club  Life  149 

rarer,  except  in  the  case  of  European  visitors.  It 
is  also  rare  in  the  East  to  receive  attention  simply 
because  one  lives  near  by.  Nowhere,  I  suppose, 
is  mere  proximity  of  residence  a  reason  for  social 
intimacy,  except  perhaps  in  Alaska  or  Central 
Africa.  But  so  far  as  I  know,  given  the  requisite 
social  possibilities,  nowhere  in  the  East  is  residence 
in  the  same  street  a  reason  for  social  attentions,  as 
it  is  not  infrequently  in  the  West.  Is  this  due  to 
the  greater  regard  paid  by  westerners  to  the  home 
and  to  domestic  life?  That  such  regard  exists  in 
special  degree  may  be  denied  by  easterners  and  even 
doubted  by  westerners  themselves.  Yet  no  one  who 
observes  the  lack  of  forms  of  social  life  outside  the 
home,  in  the  West  as  compared  with  the  East,  can 
doubt. 

The  West  is  full  of  clubs,  but  it  has  not  the  kind 
of  club  hfe  that  one  sees  in  New  York  or  Boston. 
In  the  city  of  St.  Louis  there  is  not  a  single  club 
with  large  windows  opening  directly  on  the  street, 
where  members  may  sit  idly  and  watch  what  goes 
on  outside.  There  is,  indeed,  no  street  where  things 
worth  watching  by  such  gazers  are  going  on.  The 
new  University  Club  in  Chicago,  a  magnificent  and 
well-appointed  building,  looking  its  part  perfectly 
(which  is  more  than  can  be  said  of  the  misfit 
millionaire's  palace  that  serves  the  same  purpose 
in  New  York)  has  such  windows,  and  doubtless  they 


150  The  Different  West 

will  ultimately  be  occupied;  but  they  have  been 
empty  whenever  I  have  seen  them. 

Throughout  the  West  the  clubs  are  organizations 
of  the  busy,  not  of  the  idle.  Lunch  clubs  abound: 
places  where  you  eat  and  at  the  same  time  listen 
to  instructive  discourses,  thus  killing  a  materialistic 
and  an  idealistic  bird  with  the  same  gastronomic 
stone.  Likewise  are  there  dinner  clubs  galore :  one 
could  not  belong  to  them  all  and  keep  his  dinner 
average  down  to  one  a  day. 

All  this  comes,  of  course,  from  the  exodus  of  the 
leisured,  which  leaves  only  the  busy.  Millionaires 
are  plenty  —  more  so  than  in  the  East  —  but  they 
are  all  the  busy  kind.  Generally  there  is  nothing 
visible  to  differentiate  them  from  the  citizen  of 
moderate  means.  Consequently  there  is  less  about 
them  in  the  papers,  less  vulgar  curiosity,  less  toady- 
ing. This  is  surely  natural  and  normal.  The  man 
with  ten  thousand  dollars  is  in  no  way  differentiated 
socially  from  the  man  with  twenty  thousand.  Why 
should  the  man  with  a  million  be  supposed  to  have 
stepped  over  the  line? 

There  is  more  local  pride  in  the  West  than  in 
the  East,  and  at  the  same  time  it  is  less  provincial 
than  the  eastern  varieties.  The  Bostonian,  for  in- 
stance, has  no  warmth  of  affection  for  Boston,  any 
more  than  you  or  I  love  to  live  on  this  earth  in 
preference  to   Mars  or  the  Moon.     There  is  no 


Local  Pride  151 

other  place :  that  is  all  there  is  to  it.  And  the  New 
Yorker  (so  far  as  there  are  any  real  ones),  the 
Philadelphian,  the  Baltimorean,  entertain  the  same 
kind  of  feeling  in  a  less  intense  degree.  It  would 
be  difficult  to  discover  it  in  the  West,  and  yet  one 
may  find  there  real  love  for  a  native  city,  of  the 
kind  that  we  give  to  relatives  or  dear  friends.  Fre- 
quently it  blinds  to  faults  —  it  could  not  do  that  were 
it  not  of  a  peculiar  quality. 

"I  have  known  citizens  of  Chicago  as  proud  of 
Chicago,"  says  Mr.  Bryce,  "  as  a  Londoner  in  the 
days  of  Elizabeth  was  proud  of  London."  That  is 
to  say,  Elizabethan  London  had  still  some  charac- 
teristics that  we  are  pleased  to  consider  "western." 
It  occurs  neither  to  the  modern  Londoner  nor  the 
modern  New  Yorker  to  be  proud  of  his  city.  I 
remember  hearing  wild  applause  once  in  a  college 
class  in  astronomy  when  the  professor  explained  the 
conditions  that  made  the  moon  a  satellite  of  the 
Earth  instead  of  some  other  planet.  The  boys 
"wooded  up,"  as  they  used  to  call  it,  because  "we" 
had  succeeded  in  keeping  the  moon.  A  good  deal  of 
city  pride  is  on  much  the  same  basis,  being  founded 
on  the  city's  climate,  or  situation,  or  on  growth  or 
characteristics  that  are  purely  the  result  of  these  — 
not  the  outcome  of  any  effort  whatever  on  the  part 
of  the  citizens.  One  may  be  glad  and  happy  because 
he  lives  on  a  beautiful  river  or  "  a  mile  high "  in 


152  The  Different  West 

the  air;  but  why  should  he  be  proud  of  it?  Pride 
should  be  reserved  for  an  efficient  and  honest  govern- 
ment, ideal  housing  conditions,  a  low  death  rate, 
prosperous  churches,  good  schools,  beautiful  streets 
and  parks  —  things  created  or  brought  about  by  the 
conscious  action,  industry  and  good  taste  of  the  citi- 
zens. Be  that  as  it  may,  pride  of  this  kind  is  essen- 
tially western,  and  in  some  cases  it  is  assumed  that 
if  we  start  out  with  the  pride  the  conditions  that 
ought  to  stimulate  the  pride  will  follow.  This  may 
be  a  correct  assumption.  Civic  pride  has  often  been 
the  precursor  of  civic  beauty  and  efficiency.  On  the 
other  hand,  an  ignorant  pride  is  often  the  very 
thing  that  stops  the  wheels  of  progress  —  the  "  good 
enough  for  me  "  sort  of  feeling. 

To  sum  up,  the  social  scale  exists  in  the  United 
States,  but,  outside  of  the  purposes  for  which  it 
exists,  it  makes  little  difference.  Furthermore,  it 
is  both  elastic  and  fluid;  individuals  and  families 
rapidly  pass  up  and  down  it.  And  in  the  West  it 
matters  less  than  in  the  East.  Within  its  own  sphere 
it  is  quite  as  powerful  and  important  in  one  region 
as  in  the  other,  but  its  claims  to  reach  beyond  that 
sphere  are  not  so  much  insisted  upon  or  so  fre- 
quently regarded  as  valid. 

The  choice  of  one's  social  acquaintance  is  a  good 
deal  like  shopping.  If  the  shopper  is  not  a  good 
judge  of  what  he  wants,  it  will  be  best  for  him  to 


Social  Selections  153 

go  to  some  place  of  high  repute,  where  he  may  be 
perfectly  sure  of  the  quality  of  anything  that  he  may 
buy.  But  if  he  has  good  judgment  he  may  get  better 
results  at  far  less  cost  by  selecting  what  he  wants 
wherever  he  may  find  it.  So,  if  he  is  not  quite  sure 
of  his  social  judgment,  he  had  better  frequent  a 
social  clique  whose  members  will  be  sure  to  satisfy 
his  needs,  while  if  he  knows  real  gentlefolk  when  he 
meets  them  he  will  not  hesitate  to  select  them  for 
his  associates,  no  matter  where  or  in  what  sur- 
roundings he  may  discover  them. 

This  is  what  the  westerner  does,  more  frequently 
than  the  easterner,  and  it  bears  testimony  to  his 
greater  confidence  in  his  own  ability  to  select  satis- 
factory associates. 


CHAPTER  XII 

SOURCES    OF    THE    WEST's    POPULATION 

EVERYONE  in  the  West  has  relationships  with 
other  parts  of  the  country.  Each  will  tell  you 
that  his  people  came  from  New  England,  or  Penn- 
sylvania, or  Virginia;  or  perhaps  from  Germany  or 
France.  In  many  cases,  personal  relations  are  main- 
tained with  the  family  in  the  East  or  the  South, 
perhaps  for  several  generations,  and  many  families 
have  summer  homes  in  the  state  or  region  of  their 
fathers.  This  tends  somewhat  toward  keeping  dis- 
tinct those  parts  of  the  population  that  have  different 
sources,  and  various  accidents  have  emphasized  this 
tendency,  such  as  the  civil  war,  which  was  strongly 
felt  as  a  separating  influence  between  those  of  north- 
ern and  of  southern  origin.  Emigration  from  the 
East  followed  parallels  of  latitude  pretty  closely, 
but  an  extension  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  would 
cut  across  many  of  the  Western  States,  and  the 
population  below  that  line  has  always  been  predomi- 
nantly southern. 

In  southern  Illinois  and  Indiana,  this  southern 
origin  gave  rise  during  the  war  to  organizations 
like  the  Knights  of  the  Golden  Circle,  and  was  pro- 

154 


Non-English  Races  155 

ductive  of  much  sympathy  with  the  South.  Indeed, 
the  memories  of  the  civil  war  have  not  died  out  in 
this  part  of  the  West  as  they  have  in  the  East.  If 
one  were  roughly  to  estimate  the  share  that  each 
element  has  contributed  to  western  life,  it  might  be 
said  that  southern  emigration  has  contributed  charm, 
grace,  hospitality,  and  breeding,  and  with  it  a  cer- 
tain turbulence  and  quickness  of  temper;  while  the 
northern  element  has  brought  business  ability,  in- 
terest in  civic  improvement,  with  a  settling  and 
steadying  influence;  and  the  various  foreign  contin- 
gents, each  its  native  qualities  in  greater  or  less 
degree.  One  may  expect  to  find  the  citizens  of 
southern  ancestry  genial,  popular,  well-bred,  and 
occupying  a  recognized  social  position;  the  man  of 
northern  origin,  well-to-do,  though  perhaps  not 
wealthy,  and  active  in  all  civic  movements ;  the  Ger- 
man, prosperous,  often  to  the  point  of  amassing 
great  wealth,  politically  active,  and  very  conserva- 
tive, even  when  this  attitude  puts  him  into  opposition 
with  obviously  needed  reforms. 

Exceptions  will  occur  to  all,  and  possibly  the  im- 
possible has  been  attempted  in  making  so  broad  a 
generalization  as  that  sketched  above. 

Persons  of  other  than  English  descent,  settled  in 
the  West,  include  many  of  races  somewhat  unfa- 
miliar in  the  East,  including  French,  Spanish,  and 
Scandinavians.    There  are  also  Indians  in  somewhat 


156  The  Different  West 

greater  number  than  in  the  East.  Other  races, 
familiar  in  the  East,  such  as  the  Germans,  are  par- 
ticularly strong  in  certain  cities,  such  as  Milwau- 
kee, St.  Louis,  and  Cincinnati,  and  have  materially 
affected  those  cities,  both  in  outward  aspect  and  in 
the  customs  of  commerce  and  society. 

The  Hebrew  is  hardly  as  numerous  in  the  West 
as  in  the  East:  on  this  account,  doubtless,  he  is 
more  esteemed  and  treated  with  greater  friendliness. 
Although  a  "dispersed"  race,  the  Jews  have  never 
been  willing  emigrants  —  they  have  been  forced 
abroad  by  racial  and  economic  conditions.  And 
they  stop  at  once  in  the  place  where  such  conditions 
are  favorable,  settling  quickly  down  as  a  precipitate 
settles  when  the  liquid  that  carries  it  is  no  longer 
agitated.  New  York  is  the  port  of  entry,  and  so 
New  York  has  the  greatest  Jewish  population  that 
has  ever  gathered  in  one  city  since  the  days  of 
Abraham. 

There  have  always  been  two  kinds  of  Jews  — 
those  friendly  to  foreign  customs,  modes  of  thoughts 
and  relationships,  and  those  who  keep  sternly,  even 
fanatically,  to  themselves.  The  former,  the  "Hel- 
lenizing"  Jews  of  the  ancient  world,  are  represented 
in  modern  days  by  the  great  and  familiar  Jewish 
names  —  the  Disraelis,  the  Rothschilds,  and  so  on  — 
in  the  United  States  by  names  that  will  occur  to  all ; 
men  none  the  less  proud  of  their  Hebrew  heritage 


Two  Kinds  of  Jews  157 

because  they  are  willing  and  anxious  to  work  shoul- 
der to  shoulder  with  their  comrades  of  other  faiths 
and  races  for  education,  for  civic  betterment,  for 
righteousness  in  general.  The  latter  are  repre- 
sented by  the  severely  orthodox  Jews  of  Poland  and 
Russia  who  have  been  driven  to  our  shores  of  recent 
years.  In  the  West,  if  we  may  be  rash  enough  to 
attempt  a  generalization,  here  also  the  former  type 
of  Jew  is  proportionately  stronger  than  in  the  East. 

The  French  were,  of  course,  masters  of  the  soil 
in  all  the  states  carved  out  of  the  original  Louisiana 
Purchase.  They  show  various  degrees  of  persist- 
ency as  their  original  conditions  of  life  have  been 
retained  or  changed.  The  difference  between  a 
French  and  an  English  colony  is  very  much  like 
that  between  a  cultivated  plant  and  a  weed.  The 
weed  grows  in  spite  of  you ;  you  can't  stop  it.  The 
cultivated  plant  often  shows  remarkable  results,  but 
these  are  proportioned  to  your  efforts  to  adapt  con- 
ditions to  it;  leave  it  alone  and  it  will  deteriorate, 
and  if  there  are  weeds  about  they  will  choke  it  off 
and  soon  have  the  field  all  to  themselves. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  say  that  in  comparing  the 
English  colonies  to  weeds,  I  have  reference  only 
to  their  power  of  growth  without  anyone's  fostering 
care  and  in  the  teeth  of  all  sorts  of  difficulties. 

There  are  two  places  on  the  American  continent 
where  the  French  civilization  persists  —  in  French 


158  The  Different  West 

Canada  and  in  Louisiana.  Elsewhere  it  has  practi- 
cally disappeared,  either  wholly  so,  or  is  on  its  way. 
Even  in  Louisiana  it  is  losing  its  hold.  Now,  it  is 
precisely  in  French  Canada  that  the  conditions  favor- 
able to  the  French  have  been  somewhat  artificially 
maintained  by  law.  If  it  had  not  been  so,  the  French 
plant  would  have  been  choked  by  the  English  as  it 
has  elsewhere.  In  Louisiana  many  of  the  old  condi- 
tions have  also  been  retained  —  the  plant  has  been 
cultivated,  but  not  so  sedulously.  From  this  we  may 
drop  through  some  of  the  old  Missouri  towns  like 
St.  Genevieve,  through  St.  Louis  to  Vincennes,  Ind., 
or  Cahokia,  111.,  where  the  French  occupation  is  but 
a  name.  Perhaps  the  French  survivals  in  parts  of 
the  country  where  one  has  to  search  for  them  some- 
what sedulously  are  more  interesting  than  the  full- 
fledged  civilization,  for  they  throw  some  light  on 
the  processes  of  amalgamation.  Intermarriage  is, 
of  course,  a  potent  cause.  All  through  the  West 
one  sees  French  faces  with  English  or  German 
names.  But  where  two  or  three  generations  may 
suffice  to  make  a  Teutonic  American,  they  do  not 
suffice  to  make  a  Protestant.  The  Catholic  faith 
has  proved  the  most  permanent  element  of  the  Latin 
influence. 

The  newcomer  will  be  told,  to  his  astonishment, 
in  various  parts  of  the  West,  that  the  Richardsons 


French  Relics  159 


or  the  Joneses,  or  some  others  with  an  equally  non- 
Gallic  name,  are  "  old  French  families."  These  and 
others,  where  the  names  as  well  as  the  ancestry  are 
French,  used,  not  so  long  ago,  to  send  their  children 
to  Paris  to  be  educated;  now,  in  many  cases,  they 
are  unable  even  to  speak  or  to  understand  the  tongue 
of  their  fathers;  but  they  do  cling  to  the  ancestral 
church,  and  it  is  to  this  fact  that  the  sustained  in- 
fluence of  that  church  is  due,  in  communities  where 
all  other  evidence  of  Latin  origin  is  fast  fading 
away. 

Western  place-names  are  very  apt  to  tell  the  story 
of  early  French  occupation.  They  have  been  largely 
retained,  seldom  translated;  but  their  pronunciation 
has  generally  been  ruthlessly  anglicized,  sometimes 
barbarously  so.  This  sort  of  process  is  in  the  hands 
of  the  unlearned  part  of  the  community,  not  of  the 
scholars.  If  the  latter  controlled  it,  the  foreign  pro- 
nunciation would  doubtless  be  retained.  As  it  is,  the 
French  street  names  in  St.  Louis,  for  instance,  are  at 
the  mercy  of  the  street-car  conductors,  and  what 
they  say  goes.  What  is  the  use  of  telling  a  con- 
ductor that  you  want  to  get  out  at  De  Baliviere 
Avenue,  when  he  calls  it  "  De  Bolivar"  and  would 
not  know  what  you  meant?  You  must  use  his  pro- 
nunciation, and  it  soon  becomes  the  accepted  form. 
So  Terre  Haute,  Ind.,  becomes  "Terry  Hut,"  and 


i6o  The  Different  West 

so  it  goes.  The  same  thing  has  been  done  over  and 
over  again  in  the  Mother  Country,  with  its  "  Beech- 
urns,"  its  "  Chumleys,"  and  all  the  rest 

How  do  you  suppose  the  French  feel  about  it, 
or  would  feel  if  they  ever  bothered  to  notice  any- 
thing outside  of  La  Belle?  We  Anglo-Saxons  have 
never  had  a  similar  experience.  Owing  to  our  bull- 
dog grip  on  places  that  we  have  once  laid  hold  on, 
we  have  never  seen  our  local  names  made  into  hash 
by  a  subsequent  owner.  How  should  we  feel  if  one 
of  the  Pacific  States,  we  will  say,  fell  into  the  hands 
of  the  Japanese,  who  proceeded  to  pronounce  all  our 
names  in  their  own  fashion? 

As  an  example  of  the  persistence  of  Latin  influ- 
ence in  ways  that  are  unheeded  by  those  who  have 
not  studied  them,  we  may  take  the  way  in  which  the 
street  systems  of  some  western  cities  depend  on  early 
French  colonial  customs.  When  French  colonists 
laid  out  a  town  they  provided,  well  outside  of  its 
limits,  land  for  "commons"  and  for  "common 
fields" — the  former  a  huge  open  corral  for  grazing 
animals,  and  the  latter  a  tract  to  be  divided  into 
strips  and  apportioned  for  cultivation.  As  the  town 
grew  it  often  became  necessary  to  lay  out  other 
tracts  of  land  for  "common  fields,"  and  not  infre- 
quently the  town  itself  overran  all  these  in  its  fur- 
ther growth.  In  this  case  the  streets  there  laid  out 
were  conformed  to  the  original  boundary  lines  of 


The  Germans  i6l 


the  tracts,  so  that  these  tracts  still  show  clearly  on 
the  maps,  a  century  after  their  original  functions 
have  been  forgotten.  Of  course,  the  same  thing 
happens  where  city  growth  overtakes  and  swallows 
up  small  towns  with  street  systems  of  their  own; 
but  in  the  cases  described  there  never  were  settle- 
ments on  these  tracts,  and  some  remain  still  largely 
unbuilt  upon,  while  no  effort  is  made  to  alter  their 
original  lines.  These  facts  have  recently  been 
brought  out  in  a  pamphlet  on  Real  Estate  Titles 
in  St.  Louis,  in  which  the  author,  Mr.  McCune 
Gill,  shows  by  means  of  a  map  the  location  of  the 
various  commons  and  common  fields  within  the 
present  limits  of  that  city  and  the  dependerice  of 
the  present  street  systems  on  their  situation  and 
orientation. 

There  is  an  old  newspaper  joke  about  a  traveler 
who  looks  out  of  the  window  from  his  Pullman 
berth  and,  seeing  buildings  covered  with  such  names 
as  Rauschenpfeffer,  Steinenflasch,  etc.,  says:  "Oh; 
I  see  we  have  arrived  in  Milwaukee  1 "  When  the 
Kaiser  politely  asked  the  visiting  American,  "  Is 
this  your  first  visit  to  Germany?"  and  he  replied, 
"  No,  your  Majesty,  I  have  been  in  St.  Louis,  Cin- 
cinnati, and  Milwaukee,"  he  made  the  same  jest  in 
a  different  form  —  in  fact,  it  is  quite  Protean.  The 
size  of  the  German  immigration  to  the  United 
States,  its  coherence,  and  the  solid  contributions  it 


l62  The  Different  West 

has  made  to  our  prosperity,  are  more  or  less  familiar 
to  all.  The  Germans  have  probably  kept  together  a 
little  better  in  the  West  than  elsewhere.  Great 
German  quarters  like  South  St.  Louis  or  the  "  Over 
the  Rhine  "  district  in  Cincinnati  are  more  frequent 
there  —  in  fact,  there  is  hardly  one  of  these  in  the 
East  at  all  except  the  Second  Avenue  district  in  New 
York,  which  is  now  rapidly  breaking  up.  Foreign 
immigrants,  when  they  enter  a  strange  city  in  any 
numbers,  are  apt  to  "flock  together"  at  first,  but 
as  the  strangeness  wears  off  they  usually  disperse. 
In  the  West  there  seem  to  have  been  special  reasons 
for  keeping  the  Germans  together.  In  St.  Louis, 
for  instance,  the  fact  that  they  adhered  to  the  Union 
in  1 86 1,  while  the  rest  of  the  citizens  largely  favored 
secession,  must  have  inclined  them  to  solidarity. 

The  tendency  of  nationalities  to  congregate  in 
large  cities  has  already  been  noted.  To  a  lesser 
extent  and  under  favorable  conditions  this  is  done 
also  in  the  country.  A  case  in  point  is  the  German 
colonization  of  parts  of  Pennsylvania,  giving  rise 
to  the  Pennsylvania  "  Dutch "  of  the  present  day, 
with  their  interesting  and  remarkable  preservation 
of  language,  religion,  and  customs.  An  equally 
interesting  instance  is  that  of  the  great  Scandinavian 
farming  region  in  the  northern  part  of  the  group  of 
States  that  we  have  elected  here  to  consider  as  "  The 
West" — notably  in  Minnesota  and  the  Dakotas. 


The  Scandinavians  163 

These  people  are  unfamiliar  to  the  East.  Plays 
based  on  their  peculiarities,  books,  and  newspaper 
paragraphs  in  their  dialect,  were  largely  unintelli- 
gible to  easterners;  and  they  still  are  so,  in  large 
part,  although  the  average  New  Yorker  or  Bos- 
tonian  now  knows,  at  second  hand,  that  the  Scandi- 
navian says  "Yon"  for  "John"  and  "I  ban"  for 
"I  am."  The  Scandinavian  farmer  is  one  of  the 
very  best  assets  of  the  West,  and  his  steadying 
influence  is  felt  all  along  the  line  where  he  has  been 
present  to  exert  it,  from  law-making  down  to  the 
cultivation  of  the  soil. 

The  Scandinavian  is  a  north-Teuton  who  has  been 
remote  from  Latin  influence,  and  in  this  respect 
he  is  racially  near  to  our  own  ancestors  —  Jutes, 
Saxons,  and  Angles.  This  may  be  one  reason  why 
he  becomes  so  quickly  naturalized  here,  and  why  he 
is,  on  the  whole,  so  well  liked.  He  has  a  peculiarly 
pleasing,  ingratiating  manner,  from  which  all  trace 
of  trying  to  curry  favor  is  absent,  and  which  com- 
bines the  simple-heartedness  of  a  child  with  hard- 
headed  common -sense  and  ability  to  succeed  in 
practical  matters. 

The  Indian  is  no  more  noticeable  in  the  West 
than  he  is  in  the  East,  except  in  Oklahoma.  So  far 
as  the  uncivilized  or  "blanket"  Indian  is  concerned, 
he  can  be  dropped  out  of  consideration,  as  bearing 
no  part  in  the  life  of  the  region.     The  civilized 


164  The  Different  West 

Indian  of  Oklahoma,  however,  has  relations  with 
the  rest  of  the  population  similar  to  those  of  any 
other  non-Teutonic  race,  with  the  addition  that  he  is 
conscious  of  his  position  as  one  of  the  aboriginal 
inhabitants  of  the  country.  Many  easterners,  visit- 
ing the  larger  cities  of  Oklahoma,  look  in  vain  for 
Indians  in  blankets  and  feathers,  stalking  about  the 
streets.  The  Indians  are  usually  there,  but  no  more 
distinguishable  from  other  citizens  than  are  mem- 
bers of  any  non-Teutonic  race.  We  may  reasonably 
expect  an  absorption  of  these  Indians  into  the  gen- 
eral population  at  least  as  rapidly  as  that  of  the 
Latin  races.  As  for  the  "blanket  Indian,"  he  must 
go  —  either  by  dying  out  or  by  joining  the  ranks 
of  the  civilized. 

As  for  the  negro,  his  problem  is  strung  along 
lines  that  run  north  and  south,  not  east  and  west. 
Hardly  anything  that  might  be  said  on  aspects  of 
this  problem  applies  distinctively  to  the  West  as  a 
region.  South  of  an  extension  of  Mason  and 
Dixon's  line  the  colored  element  in  the  population 
is  numerous  and  important;  north  of  it  that  element 
may  be  almost  absent.  A  recent  English  traveler 
quotes  an  Indiana  woman  as  saying,  when  she  saw 
four  negroes  walking  down  the  street,  that  she  had 
never  before  seen  so  many  colored  men  together. 
In  some  parts  of  that  State  it  would  be  surely  impos- 
sible to  make  such  a  remark. 


The  Fusing  Ground  165 

A  comparison  of  the  western  with  the  purely 
southern  negro  would  probably  show  that  the  former 
has  imbibed  more  or  less  of  the  independent  spirit  of 
the  West.  This  is  said  to  have  been  the  case  even 
in  slave  states  before  the  abolition  of  slavery.  Com- 
parison of  reminiscences  between  Virginians  and 
Missourians  shows  that,  at  least  in  many  cases,  the 
Missouri  slaves  were  not  under  as  strict  discipline 
as  the  Virginian,  and  that  they  were  really  more 
independent  and  harder  to  manage. 

Perhaps,  in  closing  this  chapter,  we  may  make  a 
generalization  even  broader  than  that  attempted, 
perhaps  unsuccessfully,  above,  with  the  danger  of 
incurring  more  severe  and  equally  just  criticism.  The 
population  in  the  West  does  not  seem  so  homoge- 
neous as  that  in  the  East.  Its  components  have  not, 
to  so  great  an  extent,  forgotten  their  sources;  even 
the  frankly  foreign  elements  are  more  clannish  and 
have  not  mingled  so  freely  with  the  rest  of  the 
people.  This  is  due  partly  to  the  fact  that  there 
has  not  been  so  much  time  for  mixing,  partly  to 
conditions  inherent  in  western  life,  and  doubtless, 
also,  to  accidents,  pure  and  simple.  The  great 
Middle  West  has  been  called  "  the  fusing  ground," 
and  fusion  is  by  no  means  an  instantaneous  process. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE    SPEECH    AND    MANNERS    OF    THE    WEST 

TOURING  my  first  visit  to  the  regions  west  of 
-■— '  the  Mississippi,  I  attended  a  reception  in  an 
interior  Missouri  town,  where  I  met  many  of  the 
townspeople  —  and  charming  people  they  were. 
"Are  you  from  the  East?"  said  one  of  them  to  me. 
"How  odd!  Eastern  people  always  have  an  ac- 
cent; and  you  talk  as  if  you  had  been  born  and 
brought  up  in  the  Mississippi  Valley!"  I  was  not 
insensible  to  the  compliment;  but  indeed  it  was  not 
a  compliment  to  me  or  to  the  speaker,  but  to  the 
mass  of  educated  Americans.  We  have  been  too 
fast  and  furiously  mixed  and  jostled  for  the  effective 
formation  of  real  local  dialects.  Yet  differences 
exist,  and  they  are  characteristic  —  so  much  so  that 
in  the  Manual  of  the  Boy  Scouts  an  attempt  is  made 
to  teach  the  new-caught  "tenderfoot"  to  distinguish 
the  origin  of  the  casual  stranger  by  his  speech.  In 
the  Official  Handbook  we  learn,  among  other 
things,  from  the  somewhat  remarkable  section  on 
"American  Dialects"  (p.  139),  that  Calif ornians 
always  say  'Frisco  for  San  Francisco;  that  an  accent 
on  the  first  syllable  of  the  second  word  in  New 

166 


American  '^ Dialects"  167 

Orleans  indicates  a  Louisianian;  that  persons  from 
the  Gulf  States  called  Carolina  "Cahline;"  that 
Chicagoans  say  "hef "  for  half  and  "kef"  for  calf, 
and  that  the  inhabitants  of  Toronto  call  it  "  Tranto." 
Boy  scouts  who  pin  their  faith  to  all  this  will  prob- 
ably make  mistakes ;  yet  it  is  often  possible  to  detect 
locality  by  the  combination  of  several  such  signs. 

The  author  of  one  of  the  latest  books  on  the 
United  States,  Annette  M.  B.  Meakin,*  writes: 

Long  before  I  ever  set  foot  in  the  New  World,  I  had 
met,  socially,  Americans  from  every  part  of  the  United 
States,  and  I  remember  that  I  often  prided  myself  on  the 
certainty  with  which  I  was  able  to  guess,  after  a  few 
minutes'  conversation,  the  part  of  his  continent  from 
which  an  American  came.  I  mention  this  particularly 
because  I  have  several  times  seen  it  stated  by  American 
writers  of  the  twentieth  century  that  all  educated  Amer- 
icans speak  exactly  alike. 

It  is,  indeed,  not  hard  to  tell  the  southerner  from 
the  New  Englander,  yet  the  South  Carolinian  does 
not  talk  like  the  Georgian,  nor  either  like  the  Vir- 
ginian; and  there  is  an  equally  noticeable  difference 
between  the  speech  of  men  from  Maine,  Massachu- 
setts, and  Connecticut.  Likewise,  the  Missourian, 
the  Illinoisan,  and  the  Minnesotan  do  not  talk  ex- 
actly alike,  but  it  ought  to  be  possible  to  differentiate 
the  speech  of  the  three,  taken  collectively,  from  that 
of  the  New  Englander  or  the  southerner.    It  is  pos- 

*  What  America  Is  Doing.    London,  191 1. 


i68  The  Different  West 

sible,  though  not  easy;  because  the  New  Englander 
and  the  southerner  have  been  well  settled  in  their 
respective  domains  for  centuries,  while  the  west- 
erner, in  some  cases,  has  scarcely  had  time  to  look 
about  him.  Here  again  we  may  fall  back  on  our 
old  analogy  of  the  Englishman  and  the  American. 
Beyond  the  so-called  "American  voice,"  which  is 
largely  a  matter  of  pitch  and  quality,  the  English- 
man notes  especially  in  the  American  speech  a  cer- 
tain hardness,  a  tendency  to  multiply  secondary 
accents  or  to  accent  every  syllable.  The  American 
can  scarcely  do  without  his  secondary  accents,  while 
the  Englishman  rarely  bothers  with  them,  even  when 
his  word  has  many  syllables.  Thus  the  Englishman 
can  and  does  pronounce  the  word  "interesting" 
with  only  one  accent  —  that  on  the  first  syllable; 
most  Americans  find  it  necessary  to  accent  both  first 
and  third,  some  giving  the  primary  stress  to  one 
and  some  to  the  other.  Disyllabic  words  like  "  Free- 
dom" or  "instant"  he  often  speaks  with  so  even  a 
stress  that  to  the  English  ear  he  appears  to  give  a 
primary  accent  to  the  ultimate  syllable.  This  pecul- 
iarity brings  with  it  that  of  oftener  giving  vowels 
their  true  value,  for  the  tendency  is  to  pronounce 
all  unaccented  syllables  with  the  neutral  vowel-sound 
{uh).  The  more  accents  we  give,  the  less  of  this 
there  is.  Hence,  the  Englishman  seems  to  us  to 
hurry  and  slur  his  syllables,  and  we  appear  to  him 


Syllabic  Stress  169 


to  talk  with  undue  stress  and  to  bring  out  vowel- 
sounds  with  an  offensive  plainness  that  amounts  to 
crudeness. 

Now,  if  the  westerners  have  any  trick  of  speech 
in  common,  it  is  doubtless  this  tendency  to  syllabic 
stress  —  those  who  do  not  use  it  would  call  it  "un- 
due," while  those  who  do  would  term  it  "normal" 
or  "proper."  The  dwelling  upon  the  sound  of  "  r," 
which  is  as  noticeable  to  the  Bostonian  as  the  latter's 
utter  neglect  of  it  is  west  of  the  AUeghanies,  is 
merely  a  special  case.  "Isn't  it  a  pity,"  said  an 
eastern  lady,  "  that  so  many  western  women,  other- 
wise educated  and  acceptable,  pronounce  their  r's 
in  such  an  impossible  manner  1"  If  to  recognize 
this  useful  letter  with  too  much  empressement  is  the 
hall-mark  of  "  impossibility,"  what  shall  we  call  the 
stony  stare  of  non-recognition  when  accorded  to  it? 
This  is  merely  a  case  of  the  general  difference  of 
stress,  noted  above. 

One  may  follow  the  dictionaries  and  talk  in  either 
way.  These  are  ^x/r^-dictionary,  or  perhaps  supra- 
dictionary  matters,  and  belong  to  the  niceties  of 
speech  where  custom  reigns  supreme.  When  the 
West  has  been  settled  as  long  as  the  South,  its  minor 
peculiarities  of  speech  will  be  cultivated  ,with  pride, 
as  are  the  southerner's,  and  no  one  will  dare  to 
comment  on  them. 

In  Professor  Lounsbury's  interesting  attempt  to 


170  The  Different  West 

discover  whether  our  early  lexicographers  had  the 
necessary  knowledge  of  polite  speech  to  entitle  them 
to  give  evidence  of  what  it  was  in  their  time,  he 
concludes  that  many  of  them  were  hardly  compe- 
tent witnesses.  In  the  early  "  one-man  "  dictionaries 
the  most  that  one  may  conclude  from  the  fact  that 
a  given  pronunciation  is  preferred,  is  that  the  author 
was  personally  familiar  with  it  and  that  it  prevailed 
in  the  society  that  he  frequented,  whatever  that 
might  be.  There  is  no  such  limitation  on  his  spell- 
ings, because  these  are  matters  of  recorded  speech 
and  circulate  too  widely  to  be  local.  There  was  no 
way  of  recording  pronunciation  accurately  before  the 
invention  of  the  phonograph.  With  its  increasing 
use,  the  records  of  voices  may  travel  as  far  and  as 
wide  as  those  of  written  speech. 

There  are,  however,  no  more  "one-man"  diction- 
aries. Our  present  works  of  reference  are  compila- 
tions and  collaborations.  Whatever  errors  they 
contain  are  due  to  haste  and  to  the  fact  that  too 
many  cooks  spoil  the  broth  —  they  are  rarely  local 
or  provincial.  Local  and  provincial  uses  are  re- 
corded, but  they  are  plainly  marked  as  such.  And 
there  has  even  been  an  effort  to  distinguish  between 
the  usage  of  sections;  one  word  may  be  marked 
"Western  U.  S."  or  even  "Illinois"  or  "Indiana." 
This  has  rarely  been  done  with  painstaking  care, 
and  one  would  err  as  greatly  in  relying  upon  the 


American  and  English  Speech         171 

dictionaries  for  his  western  "  dialect "  as  if  he  pinned 
his  faith  to  the  Boy  Scout  rules  mentioned  above. 

I  have  alluded  in  an  earlier  chapter  to  the  good 
lady  who  regarded  whatever  she  heard  in  Waltham 
as  typical  of  Massachusetts.  In  Clifton  Johnson's 
interesting  compilation  entitled  "What  They  Say 
in  New  England,"  he  has  included  many  western 
and  southern  sayings  and  customs  that  he  no- 
ticed among  transplanted  families  —  purely  exotic 
growths.  And  it  is  very  difficult  to  distinguish.  On 
a  visit  to  the  Northwest  coast  in  19 10,  I  heard  for 
the  first  time  the  expression  "  a  good  buy,"  meaning 
a  bargain.  It  seemed  to  be  in  general  use  there. 
But  in  191 1  I  saw  the  same  phrase  in  an  advertise- 
ment in  an  eastern  newspaper.  Was  the  advertiser 
a  man  from  Seattle  or  Portland?  Or  is  the  expres- 
sion old  slang,  used  locally  and  occasionally  all  over 
the  country,  which  had  merely  found  congenial  soil 
for  multiplication  in  the  Northwest?  In  an  English 
novel  written  some  time  ago  a  mother  reproves  her 
daughter  for  using  the  word  *'  fad,"  which  she 
characterizes  as  "horrible  American  slang."  Now, 
at  this  time  the  word  was  totally  unknown  in 
America,  and,  although  we  have  now  adopted  it, 
its  origin  is  purely  British.  The  English  regard 
this  country  as  the  fountain-head  of  slang  and  think 
that  our  speech  consists  of  it  exclusively  —  an 
opinion  fostered  by  the  works  of  Mr.  George  Ade 


172  The  Different  West 

and  likely  to  be  confirmed  by  the  Arctic  explorations 
of  Mr.  George  Borup. 

To  revert  for  a  moment  to  the  differences  between 
written  and  spoken  language,  our  education  regards 
the  latter  too  little.  It  is  the  mark  of  a  well-educated 
community  that  the  two  forms  keep  pretty  closely 
together,  without  coalescing.  No  one  wants  to  talk 
exactly  like  a  book,  nor  does  he  care  to  sprinkle  his 
writing  with  slang  and  colloquialisms.  Yet  it  is 
undesirable  that  the  two  should  drift  so  far  apart 
that  they  really  constitute  two  dialects,  as  they  do 
in  some  parts  of  the  world.  Now  we  lay  great  stress 
on  correct  writing  in  our  system  of  education,  and 
little  on  correct  speaking.  The  chief  idea  that  some 
of  us  have  of  the  latter  is  that  it  is  an  exact  copy  of 
correct  writing.  This  results  in  what  has  been  called 
" schoolmarm's  English;"  it  induces  well-meaning 
persons  to  say,  "Are  you  not  going?  "  and  "  I  offered 
him  a  slight  recompense,"  and  to  use  hundreds  of 
other  similar  phrases.  Children  are  not  taught, 
either  in  school  or  at  home,  to  talk  in  correct  collo- 
quial English,  and  it  is  never  even  hinted  to  them 
that  the  quality  or  tone  of  voice  in  which  they  speak 
means  as  much,  and  is  as  important,  as  the  words 
they  use. 

Some  persons  awaken  to  this  in  after-life  and  try 
to  alter  their  voices,  with  the  result  that  they  talk 


Education  of  Speech  173 

artificially,  like  actors.  This  sort  of  thing  must  be 
learned  in  childhood  or  not  at  all. 

It  is  commonly  said  that  the  English  have  better 
speaking  voices  than  we  do.  There  is  not  much  to 
choose  between  the  best  American  and  the  best 
English  voices;  likewise,  the  bad  ones  among  them 
compare  unfavorably  with  our  worst.  The  Amer- 
ican, says  G.  W.  Steevens,  often  talks  English  "  with 
a  clarity  of  pronunciation  that  puts  me  again  and 
again  to  shame."  But  it  is  undeniable  that  a  larger 
proportion  of  them  than  of  us  speak  with  a  pleasant 
and  acceptable  intonation.  Between  the  so-called 
"haw-haw"  speech,  which  is  ridiculed  in  England 
as  much  as  it  is  here,  and  the  extreme  American 
nasal  tone,  it  would  be  hard  to  choose.  We  are 
told  that  the  pessimist,  when  confronted  with  two 
evils,  takes  both.  In  like  manner,  he  who  is  anxious 
to  compare  English  with  American  manners  is  fond 
of  taking  both  these  extremes  as  typical.  For  his 
own  purposes  he  is  right,  of  course;  but  as  a  matter 
of  fact  the  cultivated  Englishman  and  the  cultivated 
American  talk  a  good  deal  ahke. 

This  education  of  speech  has  probably  gone  fur- 
ther in  the  East  than  in  the  West.  It  is  a  matter  of 
home  training  and,  above  all,  of  example,  rather 
than  of  school  discipline.  The  pleasantest  qualities 
of  voice  that  we  have  are  to  be  found  in  Maine  and 


174  The  Different  West 

Virginia  —  slow  and  distinct  in  enunciation,  sweet  in 
intonation.  In  neither  state  are  children  taught  in 
the  schools  how  to  speak.  The  persons  who  talk 
as  I  have  described  are  never  in  a  hurry  (south  of 
Washington  and  north  of  Boston,  time  has  no  value) 
and  they  would  not  be  accounted  typical  Americans 
of  the  "hustling"  variety.  Is  it  possible  that  a 
rasping,  metalHc,  high-pitched  intonation  has  some 
connection  with  business  energy? 

If  so,  we  must  not  soon  look  for  its  discontinuance. 
It  has  been  suggested  that  it  is  the  result  of  our  dry, 
harsh  climate;  but  the  softness  of  both  the  Maine 
and  the  Virginia  voices  would  seem  to  negative  this 
idea. 

When  our  attention  Is  called  to  a  thing  and  we 
are  convinced  that  it  needs  mending,  we  usually 
mend  it.  I  look,  therefore,  to  see  that  increased  care 
in  the  training  of  children  to  speak,  and  in  giving 
them  desirable  models  to  imitate  at  home,  will  ulti- 
mately overcome  whatever  racial  and  climatic  in- 
fluences may  be  drawing  us  in  the  other  direction, 
and  will  give  to  all  of  us  the  pleasant  mode  of  speech 
that  some  of  us  have  already.  So  much  for  speech. 
In  regard  to  manners,  the  German  lady,  quoted  by 
Bryce,  who  thought  American  women  in  the  West 
were  "furchtbar  fret  und  furchtbar  fromm,"  could 
not  have  been  more  astonished  at  either  of  these 
phases  than  the  average  eastern  visitor  is  apt  to 


Chaperonage  ij^ 

be  on  occasion.  For  the  East  has  been  taking  on 
European  customs.  Fifty  years  ago,  East  and  West 
were  alike  in  practically  rejecting  any  system  of 
chaperonage  whatever.  It  was  customary,  for  in- 
stance, for  a  young  woman  to  go  alone  to  the  theater 
with  a  young  man.  Today  this  is  vastly  less  com- 
mon in  the  East  than  in  the  West.  Whether  the 
West  will  follow  suit  can  hardly  be  said  as  yet;  but  it 
is  surely  amusing  to  witness  the  horror  of  certain 
good  eastern  ladies  at  customs  which  were  those  of 
the  East  itself  in  their  own  girlhood,  or,  at  any  rate, 
in  that  of  their  mothers. 

Westerners  are  still  able  to  analyze  the  meaning 
of  chaperonage  in  such  cases  as  this,  and  to  apply  a 
little  common-sense  to  it.  If  a  young  man  and  a 
young  woman  must  always  be  accompanied  by  an 
older  person,  the  functions  of  the  latter  must  evi- 
dently be  either  to  prevent  the  young  woman  from 
acting  with  impropriety,  or  to  protect  her  from  the 
young  man.  The  westerners  think  they  know  their 
young  people ;  and  I  believe  that  they  do.  Easterners 
used  to  think  so  too;  why  have  they  changed?  Not 
because  the  young  people  have  altered,  but  solely, 
I  believe,  in  response  to  the  dictates  of  fashion.  This 
is  unfortunate,  and  it  is  having  a  bad  effect  on  eastern 
women.  They  are  vastly  less  unconscious  of  their 
sex  than  the  western  woman.  In  the  West,  a  man 
and  woman,  both  well  bred,  will  fall  into  conversa- 


176  The  Different  West 

tion  on  a  train,  just  as  two  men  would  do;  where 
an  eastern  woman  would  not  think  of  doing  or  suf- 
fering such  an  indignity.  In  the  West,  almost  alone 
among  American  regions,  does  it  now  seem  possible 
for  a  woman  to  forget  that  she  is  a  woman  and  to 
regard  herself  merely  as  a  human  being. 

In  his  chapter  on  "The  Temper  of  the  West," 
written  seventeen  years  ago,  Bryce  tells  us  of  west- 
ern business  men  that  "they  rise  early;  they  work 
all  day;  they  have  few  pleasures,  few  opportunities 
for  relaxation."  To  the  first  part  of  this  indictment 
we  may  still  plead  guilty.  The  western  business 
day  does  begin  early.  The  young  man  who  has 
been  accustomed  to  drift  into  a  New  York  or  Boston 
office  at  9  A.M.  is  surprised,  on  removing  to  Chicago 
or  St.  Louis,  to  find  that  his  presence  is  expected 
at  7  :30.  Working-hours,  however,  are  no  longer 
than  in  the  East;  the  earlier  arrival  is  offset  by 
earlier  departure,  and  the  clerk  gets  time  for  recrea- 
tion in  the  afternoon  —  a  most  sensible  plan.  As  for 
lack  of  pleasures  and  of  opportunities  for  relaxa- 
tion, it  is  difficult  to  see  where  Mr.  Bryce  obtained 
his  information  on  this  point.  Of  course,  the  rec- 
reative value  of  this  or  that  employment  depends 
largely  on  the  personal  equation.  The  man  who 
thinks  that  all  time  not  spent  on  a  schooner  yacht 
is  irrecoverably  lost,  can  evidently  not  exist  com- 
fortably in  Indianapolis  or  Cincinnati.     I  once  wit- 


Conclusion  177 

nessed  a  game  of  polo  in  the  hills  of  Northwestern 
Connecticut.  It  was  the  funniest  sight  I  ever  saw. 
The  ball  reposed  in  the  center  of  the  field,  while 
the  players  on  both  sides  were  trying  to  get  their 
frantic  mounts  near  enough  to  it  to  hit  it.  This 
convinced  me  that  to  play  polo  one  needs  polo 
ponies.  So  the  man  who  knows  of  no  recreation 
but  polo  will  keep  away  from  Litchfield  County  until 
the  importation  of  his  favorite  beasts  makes  it  more 
attractive.  But  all  this  is  not  to  say  that  no  one 
enjoys  himself  in  Indianapolis,  or  Cincinnati,  or  in 
Litchfield,  Conn.  The  fact  is  that  the  westerner, 
by  reason  of  his  free  and  easy  disposition,  his  readi- 
ness to  take  things  as  they  come,  and  to  amuse 
himself  in  any  way  that  offers,  is  peculiarly  easy 
to  entertain,  and  self-entertainment  becomes  with 
him  a  simple  task. 

It  may  be  well,  in  closing  this  somewhat  dis- 
cursive account  of  things  whose  very  obviousness 
may  make  their  perusal  amusing  to  some  and  im- 
possible to  others,  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  the 
increasing  standardization  of  the  elements  of  our 
national  civilization,  noted  by  more  than  one  ob- 
server, never  can  make  for  a  dead-level  of  uni- 
formity. Mayor  Gaynor  of  New  York,  in  a  recent 
address,  asserted  that  the  school  children  of  that 
city  are  acquiring  "  uniform  minds,"  and  as  a  conse- 


178  The  Different  West 

quence  are  growing  to  have  "  uniform  faces."  Prince 
Henry  of  Prussia  noted  that  what  may  be  called  a 
"university  type"  of  face  prevails  among  our  college 
students.  By  the  methods  of  craniometry  and  phys- 
ical measurement  it  has  been  established  that  the 
diverse  elements  of  our  population  are  really  grow- 
ing alike.  Yet  the  more  the  general  features,  phys- 
ical or  intellectual,  approach  each  other,  the  more 
noticeable  minor  differences  become,  and  where 
there  are  differences  that  can  not  be  obliterated,  such 
as  those  of  topography  and  climate,  these  will  con- 
tinue to  be  reflected  in  the  regional  habits  and 
character. 

We  may  expect,  then,  that  there  will  always  be 
an  East  and  a  West,  until  that  time  when,  as  the 
poet  says : 

Earth  and  sky  meet  presently 
At  God's  great  judgment  seat. 

That  both  will  so  bear  themselves  as  to  be  able  on 
that  day  to  render  a  good  account  of  their  peculiar 
gifts  and  of  the  way  in  which  each  has  used  them, 
neither  the  eastern  nor  the  western  reader  of  these 
pages  will,  I  am  sure,  have  any  doubt. 


INDEX 


Accent,  American,  i68 

Adams,     artist     of     "  Hoosier 

Group,"  129 
Ade,  George,  use  of  slang  by, 

171 
Agriculture,  scientific,  115 
Alton,  111.,  a  hilly  town,  12 
Alumni  associations,  89 
American  bottoms,  the,  13 
American  voice,  168 
Americans,  in  British  novels,  2 
Amusements  in  the  West,  176 
Anglo-Saxon  local  names,  160 
Anglo-Saxons  not  artists,  123 
Antiquities  in  the  West,  124 
Architecture  in  the  West,  124 
Arizona,  constitution  of,  73 
Art  in  the  West,  123 ;  exhibi- 
tions, 126;  museums,  127;  in- 
struction in  the  West,  136 
Artists'  Guild,  St.  Louis,  128 
Arts  and  crafts  movement,  128 
Authors'  Club,  N.  Y.,  128 

Baptist  Church,  145 
Beaux-Arts  architecture,  125 
Bellman,  The,  Minneapolis,  103 
Bicknell,  Frank  M.,  article  by,  2 
Blaine,  J.  G.,  candidacy  of,  52 
Bluffs  and  prairies,  1 1 
Borup,  George,  use  of  slang  by, 

Boston,  assumed  primacy  of, 
45 ;  former  literary  suprem- 
acy, 95 ;  local  feeling  in,  150; 
publishers  in,  99;  speech  of, 
169 

Boston  Transcript,  104,  no 

Bottom  lands,  1 1 


Boy  Scouts,  166 
Bronx,  growth  of,  29 
Brigandage  in  the  West,  63 
Bryan,  W.  J.,  53,  57 ;  as  editor, 

103 
Bryant,  William  Cullen,  97 
Bryce,   James,   quoted,   23,   63, 

80,  104,  151,  174,  176 
Business  habits,  western,  176 

Cahokia,  111.,  13,  158 
California,  irrigation  in,  116 
Canada,  French  in,  158 
Catholic  Church,  124;  in  Mary- 
land, 144;  in  Mississippi  val- 
ley, 145;  in  the  West,  158 
"  Central  States,"  8 
Ceremony,  growth  of,  84 
Chaperonage  in  the  West,  175 
Chauvenet,  William,  108 
Chicago,    105;    Art     Museum, 
127;  as  a  publishing  centre, 
99;  clubs  in,  149;  field-houses, 
34,  81 ;   local  pride   in,   151 ; 
playgrounds,  34,  81 ;  Univer- 
sity of,  82,  91 ;  Yale  scholar- 
ships in,  90. 
Chicago  River  in  art,  129 
Chicago-St.  Louis  railway  serv- 
ice, 119 
Chinese  curiosity,  38 
Christian  Church,  146 
Churches,  established,  144 
Churchill,  Winston,  37, 97 
Cincinnati,  Germans  in,  161 
City  Club,  St.  Louis,  10 
City  clubs,  55 
City  plans,  54 
I  Civic  pride,  152 


179 


i8o 


Index 


Civil  War,  effect  on  democracy, 
56;   memories  of,   155;   Ger- 
mans in,  162 
Civilizations,  old  and  new,  28 
Cleveland,  Grover,  candidacy  of, 

52 
Cleveland  Public  Library,  94 
Climate,  western,  17 
Clubs  in  the  West,  149 
Clusman,  Chicago  artist,  129 
Coal,  hard  and  soft,  117 
Co-education,  86 
College  "yells,"  86 
Colleges,  see  Universities 
Collier,  Price,  quoted,  143 
Colonies,  French,  160 
Colonizers  and  colonized,  32 
Commoner,  The,  Lincoln,  Neb., 

103 
Commons   in  French   colonies, 

160 
Competition,  railway.  119 
Congregational  Church,  144, 146 
Connecticut,  established  church 

in,  144 
Constabulary,  need  for,  64 
Constitutions, "  freak,"  70 
Crops  in  the  West,  16 
Cummins,  Senator,  53 
Curiosity  of  Yankees,  38 
Cyclones,  18 

Dakotas,  Scandinavians  in,  162 
Davis,  R.  H.,  quoted,  25 
Democracy,  East  and  West,  56 ; 

in  education,  83 
Dialects,  American,  167 
Dictionaries,   pronunciation   in, 

170 
Drama  in  the  West,  134 
Dutch  Reformed  Church,  145 

Economic  unrest,  66 
Education    and    manners,    30; 
extra-scholastic,   92;    in    the 


West,  80;  in  speaking,  173; 

musical  and  artistic,  137 
English  accent,  168 
Electric  roads,  interurban,  21 
Episcopal  Church,  144 
European  customs,  175 

Faculty,  social  attitude  of,  87 

Farmer,  as  a  debtor,  67 

Farms,  20 

Federal  secret  service,  65 ;  treat- 
ment of  train-robbery,  65 

Field-houses  in  Chicago,  34, 81 

"  First  Lady  in  the  Land,"  142 

Forsyth,  artist  of  "  Hoosier 
Group,"  129 

French  element  in  the  West, 
123, 157 

Friends,  Society  of,  in  Pennsyl- 
vania, 144 

"  Frisco  "  Railroad,  121 

Gas  as  fuel,  117 

Gaynor,  William  J.,  quoted,  177 

German  element  in  the  West, 

15s,  161 ;  influence  on  music, 

133 
Giddings,  Franklin  H.,  quoted, 

59 
Gill,  McCune,  quoted,  161 
Gould  railway  interests,  78 
Greeley,  Horace,  nomination  of, 

50 

Harriman  railway  interests,  78 
Harvard's  college  "yell," 86 
Harvest,  20 
Hearst,  W.  R.,  buys  magazine, 

100 
Henry,  O.,  quoted,  98 
Henry     of     Prussia,     Prince, 

quoted,  178 
"  Hoosier  Group  "  of  artists,  129 
Hopi  Indians,  124 
Hospitality,  western,  148 
Hours  of  work  in  the  West,  176 


Index 


i8i 


Hughes,  Charles  E.,  50 
Hysteresis,  33 

Illinois,  southern  element  in,  154 

Illinois  Traction  Co.,  22 

Imitation  in  American,  Art,  130 

Impressionism  in  Art,  130 

"  In  Mizzoura,"  play,  136 

Income-tax,  75 

Indian  art,  124 

Indians  in  the  West,  163 

Indiana,  negroes  in,  164;  south- 
ern element  in,  154 

Indianapolis  in  art,  129;  subur- 
ban terminal  in,  22 

"  Insurgents,"  53 

Interurban  roads,  21 

Intimacy,  conditions  of,  40 

Irish  in  New  England,  147 

Irrigation,  115 

Irving,  Washmgton,  95 

James  brothers,  bandits,  63 
Jews  in  the  West,  156 
Journalism  in  the  West,  100 
Judiciary,  western,  71 

Kansas  border  warfare,  63; 
droughts  in,  116;  as  the 
"  Helot  of  politics,"  70 

Kansas  City  boulevards,  34 

Keokuk  dam,  1 14, 117 

Knights  of  the  Golden  Circle, 
154 

Labouchere,  Henry,  103 
La  Follette,  Robert,  53 
La  Follette's  Weekly,  103 
Language,  spoken  and  written, 

172 
Law,  untenable  theory  of,  72 
Legislation  against  smoke,  118 
Leisure  class,  absence  of,  147 
Levees,  15 
Libraries,  03 
Litchfield,  Conn.,  177 


Literature  in  the  West,  95;  is- 
sued by  railways,  120 
Local  pride,  western,  150 
Louisiana,  French  in,  158 
Lounsbury,  Prof.,  quoted,  169 
Lowell's    "  certain    condescen- 
sion," 33 
Lummis,  Charles  R,  quoted,  34 
"  Luck,"  defined,  62 
Lutheran  Church,  146 

McKinley-Bryan  campaign,  61 
Maine,  intonation  in,  173 
Manners  of  the  West,  166 
Maryland,  Catholics  in,  144 
Meakin,  Ohio  artist,  129 
Meakin,  A.  M.  B.,  quoted,  167 
Merriam,  Professor,  defeat  for 

mayor,  54 
Methodist  Church,  145 
Metropolitan  museum,  N.  Y.,  126 
Middle  West,  position  of,  8 
Millionaires,  western,  150 
Milwaukee,  a  German  city,  161 : 

Public  Library,  94;  Socialist 

victory  in,  70 
Minneapolis,  Minn.,  105 
Minnesota,  Scandinavians  in,  162 
Mirror,  The,  St.  Louis,  103 
Missions  in  the  West,  145 
Mississippi  river,  114 ;  in  art,  129 
Missouri,  slavery  in,  165 
Missouri  Pacific  railroad,  121 
Mortgages  on  western  farms,  67 
Mounds  at  Cahokia,  13 
Mugwump  secession,  52 
Music  in  the  West,  133 
Musical  instruction  in  the  West, 

137 

Napoleon,  anecdote  of,  62 
Nashville,    Tenn.,    O.    Henry's 

story  of,  98 
National  Academy  of  Fine  Arts, 

126 
Natural  gas,  117 


l82 


Index 


Navaho  Indians,  124 
Nebraska,  droughts  in,  ii6;  Uni- 
versity of,  137 
Negroes  in  the  West,  164 
New  countries,  28 
New  England  villages,  29 
New  Hampshire,     insurgency  " 

in,  53 
New  Haven  railroad,  122 
New  Orleans,  Catholics  in,  145 
New  York,  28;  a  city  of  out- 
siders, 96 ;  as  a  publishing  cen- 
tre, 99;  as  an  art  centre,  126; 
Authors'  Club,  128;  German 
district  in,  162;  Jews  in,  156; 
literary  group,  95 
New  York  Sun,  107, 109 
News,  character  of,  in  papers, 

106 
Newspapers,  western,  100 
"Nigger,"  The,  play,  136 
Night  travel,  122 
Nipher,  F.  J.,  physicist,  108 
Norris,  Frank,  quoted,  97;  on 

the  rate  question,  78 
Northern  element  in  the  West, 
155 

Occupation,  social  influence  of, 

138 
Office-holders,  social  status  of, 

141 
Ohio  in  art,  129 
Oklahoma,  constitution  of,  70; 

Indians  in,  163 
Oklahoma  City,  25 
"  One-night  stands,"  135 
"Over  the  Rhine,"  Cincinnati, 

162 

Pankhurst,  Sylvia,  in  St.  Louis, 

ID 

Pavements  in  St.  Louis,  34 
Pennsylvania  "  Dutch,"  162 
Pennsylvania,  Friends  in,  144; 
sectionalism  in,  48 


Periodicals  in  the  West,  99 
Philadelphia  as  an  art  centre, 

126 ;  publishers  in,  99 
Pittsbugh,  Pa.,  117 
Place-names,  French,  159 
"  Places  "  in  western  cities,  21 
Playgrounds,  81 
Plutocracy  in  eastern  colleges, 

90 
Police,  necessity  for  state,  64 
Poe,  Edgar  A.,  95 
Politics  in  the  West,  47 
Popular  Mechanics,  100 
Population,  sources  of,  154 
Populists,  rise  of,  53 
Post,  Louis  F.,  editor,  103 
Prairies,  rolling,  12 
Presbyterian  church,  145 
President,  social  status  of,  141 
Professor  and  student,  88 
Progressive  party,  53 
Pronunciation,   in   dictionaries, 

170 
Public,  The,  Chicago,  103 
Public  Libraries,  93, 107 
Public  Library,  Cleveland,  94; 

St.  Louis,  120 
Public  school  in  the  West,  80 

Quincy,  III.,  112 

Racial  characteristics,  24 
Radicalism,  eastern  and  western, 

74 
Railways,  comparison  between, 
119;  feeling  against,  76;  pe- 
culiarities   of,    21 ;    publicity 
literature,    100;    rate-regula- 
tion, 76 ;  speeds,  121 
Recall  of  judges,  73 
Recreation,  facilities  for,  81 
Reedy,  William  M.,  editor,  103 
Religion  and  social  status,  144 
Remington,     Frederic,     artist, 
129 


Index 


183 


Republicans,  Liberal,  in  1872,  50 
Ritualizing  influences,  84 
River  improvement,  112 
River  transportation,  yj 
Rivers  in  the  West,  11;  muddi- 

ness  of,  14 
Roosevelt,  Theodore,  53,  57,  y6 ; 

attacks  on  judiciary,  73 
Rose,      George,      Impressions 

quoted,  48 


St.  Anthony,  Falls  of,  114 

St.  Genevieve,  Mo.,  158 

St.  Louis,  105, 1 1 1, 1 14, 158 ;  Acad- 
emy of  Science,  108 ;  Art  Mu- 
seum, 127;  Artists'  Guild, 
128;  Catholics  in,  145;  City 
Club  of,  10 ;  club  life  in,  149 ; 
defeat  of  new  ^  charter,  54 ; 
French  names  in,  159;  Ger- 
mans in  Civil  War,  162; 
library  co-operation  with 
schools,  94;  new  residence 
district,  34;  Public  Library, 
120 ;  real-estate  titles  in,  161 ; 
street-lighting  in,  55 ;  interur- 
ban  terminal,  22 

St.  Paul,  Minn.,  105 

Salmagundi  Club,  N.  Y.,  128 

Scandinavian  element  in  the 
West,  163 ;  farmers,  i6« 

Scenery,  American  feeling  for, 
122 

Science  in  the  West,  108 

Sculpture  in  the  West,  131 

Seattle,  Wash.,  105 

"  Show-me"  attitude,  60 

Silver  question,  58 

Slang  in  the  West,  171 

"  Slogans  "  for  cities,  105 

Smoke  nuisance,  116 

Social  scale,  definition  of,  139 

Socialism,  59;  in  Milwaukee,  70; 
successes  of,  53 

Society  in  the  West,  138 


Southern  element  in  the  West, 

154      . 
Speculation  defined,  66 
Speech  of  the  West,  166 
Speeds,  on  railways,  121 
Springfield  Republican,  104 
Stark,     artist      of      "  Hoosier 

Group,"  129 
State  universities,  future  of,  91 
Steele,     artist     of     "  Hoosier 

Group,"  129 
Steevens,  G.  W.,  quoted,  24,61, 

70, 173 
Street  systems,  French,  160 
Suburbs,  western,  20 
Suggestion  in  art,  131 
Sumner,  Wm.  G.,  quoted,  83 
Supreme  Court,  U.  S.,  74 
Swedenborgian  Church,  146 
Sylvester,  Frederick,  artist,  129 

Tacoma,  Wash.,  105 
Tammany,  movements  against, 

50 
Technical  World  Magazine,  100 
"  Tenderloins,"  imitation,  54 
Terre  Haute,  Ind.,  159 
Texas  rangers,  64 
Theatre  in  the  West,  134 
Tornadoes,  western,  18 
Train  robberies,  63 
Transportation  problem,  76;  by 

water,  112 
Trees,  western,  16 
Trelease,  William,  botanist,  108 
Trusts,  West  and  East,  68 

Union  Pacific  railroad,  121 
Universities,    eastern,    51.    82; 
growth  of  western,  91 ;  local 
and  continental,  88;  state,  34, 
82 
University  Club,  Chicago,  149 
University  of  Chicago,  82, 91 
University  of  Nebraska,  137 
University  type  of  face,   178 


1 84 


Index 


Villages  in  the  West,  29 

Vincennes,  Ind.,  158 

Virginia,  established  church  in, 
144;  intonation  in,  173;  sla- 
very in,  165. 

"Wall  Street,"  feeling  against, 

68 
Water  power,  114;  supply,  no 
Watts,  Mrs.,  Ohio  writer,  97 
Weather  in  the  West,  17 
West,  meaning  of  the  term,  6 
Wharf-boats,  15 
Whisky  Insurrection,  47 
White,  William  Allen,  writer,  97 
"  Wild  and  Woolly  "  character- 
istics, 27 


Willis,  N.  P.,  96 
Wilson,  Woodrow,  quoted,  63 
Wisconsin  University,  86 
Wixford,  John,  chemist,  ni 
Woman's  Clubs,  92 
World   To-day,   Hearst's   pur- 
chase of,  100 

Yale  University,  anecdote  of, 
52 ;  ceremonies  at,  84 ;  college 
"yell,"  86;  scholarships  in 
Chicago,  90 

Yankee,  in  English  books,  38 

Zeliony,  experiments  of,  3 


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